I try her mobile one more time but it still doesn’t seem to have been switched over. It’s the same every time I call. It takes ages for anyone to answer and then all I get is a bonkers recorded message in Flemish. I give up. It’s way past midnight. I might as well go to bed.
“So, she didn’t call you until this morning?”
“No, she called me last night but I was out.”
“Where did you go?”
“Yeah, why weren’t we invited?”
“I didn’t go anywhere. I was at Budgens. I was out buying two-for-one lager and replacement Toilet Duck.”
“And she didn’t bother leaving you a message?”
“No. I said on the answer phone that I was going to Kate’s art exhibition and for some reason it sent her into a bit of a strop.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.”
“Probably because you lied to her.”
“Well, I didn’t want her to think I was just moping around the flat on my own.”
“But that’s what you were doing.”
“Yeah, but that’s not the point. The point is she tried to phone me back later and I was engaged for three hours.”
“Who to?”
“No one. I was on-line. I was just about to go to bed but I don’t get the chance to use Alison’s computer very often because I always end up deleting something important or messing up her favourites folder and, you know, once you log on, well, it’s addictive, isn’t it?”
“What were you looking at?”
“Oh, nothing much, music sites mainly.”
“What, for three hours?”
“Well, yeah, that and the Kentucky Fried Chicken website.”
“The KFC website? Are you mental?”
“Probably, but I was watching this advert for bargain buckets the other day and I couldn’t help noticing that there was a web address given at the bottom of the screen.”
“So what? Doesn’t mean you have to go and look at it, does it?”
“I couldn’t help myself. It just kept eating away at me. I had to know what was on it. I had to understand what kind of a person would bother to log on to a fried chicken website. I mean, why would you do it? What could you possibly expect to find?”
“Naked chicks?”
“No.”
“Naked chickens?”
“No.”
“The Colonel’s secret recipe?”
“No. They keep it locked away in some kind of a vault. In Louisville. It’s over sixty years old. The Colonel came up with it way back in
1939.”
“You don’t say.”
“Yeah, it’s true. Plus, if you live in the States, you can use the automatic store locator and order yourself a bucket of hot wings over the Net whenever you want.”
“Wow,” says Matty excitedly. “Delivery hot wings. How cool is that?”
“Jesus,” says Vince, lowering his head into his hands. “You finally get the place to yourself and you spend the whole night looking at deep-fried chicken thighs when you could have been looking at porn. You’re a very sick man.”
This is not strictly true. I did look at some porn. It’s almost impossible not to. Type in the Great Wall of China and one way or another your search engine always finds a way of directing you to Asian Babes. I couldn’t seem to find anything good, though, especially not if you want to download it for free. The best I could come up with was a dodgy m-peg involving an irate pig and a man with a giant
scrotum and a site called “One Dollar for Seven Days of Lesbians’.
“Sounds like a bargain,” says Vince thoughtfully. “Just make sure you remember to erase it from your Internet history before Alison gets back from Bruges.”
“Right,” I say, ‘good idea. I’ll make sure I do it as soon as I get home.”
We stub out our cigarettes, crank up the PA and prepare ourselves for another quick run-through of the set. It’s hot down here. We’ve spent the last five hours rehearsing in a John McCarthy-style basement with no windows and no ventilation, and we’re all beginning to feel a bit claustrophobic. Everyone is sweating. Vince has a steady trickle of salt droplets skidding down his temples to his cheeks and Matty’s T-shirt is practically soaked through. It’s a good thing, though: it helps wash away the stink of the mould.
The final run-through takes just over an hour, and by the end of it Vince seems almost satisfied. He’s a perfectionist. If we screw up part of a song or hit a couple of bum notes he always makes us go back to the beginning and play the whole thing over again instead of just working on the section we messed up. He’s always been the same. Vince was always the leader. He chose what we should wear and how we should wear it. How we should cut our hair; what brand of cigarettes we ought to smoke. He decided where we should rehearse and for how long, and only when he was completely satisfied that we’d got it right would he let us move on to something else. We’ve done it, though. We’ve made it to the end. We’ve played through the entire set without a single fuck-up.
“Not bad,” says Vince, unplugging his amp and winding a length of guitar cable round his arm. “There’s still a fair bit of work to do but a couple more months and we should be almost ready.”
We breathe a sigh of relief. I don’t know about Matty
but another hour down here and I’d probably have ended up having a stroke.
We’re recovering in the local beer garden with a couple of pints of well-chilled lager and we’re deep in discussion about touring and transport and trousers.
“No way.”
“Why not?”
“What are you thinking of? Why would we want to dress in bell-bottoms and surgeons’ overalls?”
“It’ll look interesting.”
“No it won’t, it’ll look stupid.”
“Well, we’ve got to find some way of making an impact,” says Vince, rolling down his sleeves. “We need to distinguish ourselves from Scarf ace, don’t we? You got the four of them ponced up in leather trousers, army boots and Che Gue-fucking-vara Tshirts and then you got us—’
“In giant flares and surgeons’ overalls?”
“Yeah, why not?”
“Because we’ll look ridiculous.”
“Well,” says Vince triumphantly, ‘that’s where you’re missing the whole point. We’re rock stars. We’re meant to look ridiculous.”
“So,” I say, attempting to get things back on track, ‘how much do you think it’s all going to cost?”
“Well,” says Vince, ‘there’s the thousand dollars for the buy-on fee, then there’s the cost of hotels and van hire… add to that the wages we’re all going to lose while we’re off work and I reckon we’re probably looking at the best part of three grand.”
“What about a roadie for the gear?”
“Can’t afford it. We’ll just have to hump the stuff ourselves.”
“What about sound and monitors?”
“Well, we can’t afford to take our own so we’ll have to find
out how much Scarface’s sound guy is gonna want to take care of us.”
“Yeah, but he’s bound to screw us over, isn’t he? He’s bound to make us sound shit compared to Scarface.”
“You got a better idea?”
“No,” I say, “I haven’t. I’ll give their tour manager a ring tomorrow and find out how much he’s going to want.”
I help myself to one of Matty’s pork scratchings I try to find one that doesn’t have any hair coming out of the top of it and we move swiftly on to the subject of accommodation.
“Looks like it’s going to have to be bed-and-breakfasts,” says Vince, crossing out another set of zeros on his beer-mat. “I mean, there’s no way we can afford to lay out for proper hotels, but if we share a room in a B&tB and spend a couple of nights in the van we can probably just about swing it.”
“Great,” I say, draining the beer at the bottom of my glass and nodding at Matty. “Remember to pack your earplugs, then. Vince snores like a rhino full of snot when he’s pissed.”
“I do not.”
“Yeah you do. We shared a room on the last Agent Orange tour and I hardly slept a wink for the whole three weeks.”
“Yeah, well, at least I change my socks once in a while. You wore the same pair for the whole tour. They were crisper than a packet of cheese-and-onion kettle chips by the end of it.”
“Well, at least I don’t spend all morning fiddling about with my hair. I mean, how many toiletry products can one bloke take away with him?”
“What about you? I’ve seen you poncing about in front of the mirror with your tub of Black and White. I bet you spend hours in the bathroom trying to give yourself one of them shark’s-fin haircuts when no one’s looking.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. Of course I don’t.”
“Christ almighty,” says Matty, getting up to buy another round of drinks, ‘you two are worse than a married couple. It’s going to be like going on tour with my mum and dad.”
It’s starting to get late. I promised Kostas I’d put in a couple of extra hours at the video shop before closing time, so I leave the guys soaking up the last rays of evening sunshine and head off to work. I’ve no idea how I’m going to contribute my share of the money. I know Vince has some savings from his plumbing job and Matty always seems to earn pretty good money for his DJing, but it’s hard enough for me to come up with my share of the rent, let alone find a spare thousand pounds for the tour. I suppose I could always see if Alison would lend it to me I know she would if I asked but I feel like I’ve taken too much off her already. It looks like I’ll just have to find a way of raising the money by myself.
I stroll north down Ferme Park Road and rest at the lip of Crouch Hill to admire the view for a moment. The sky is celebrating. The horizon is swigging tequila over Alexandra Palace to signal the day’s end, and it suddenly feels all wrong. It doesn’t suit my mood. I don’t like sunsets anyway. They’re gaudy. Burnt orange, blood red, labia pink and bell-end purple all mixed together with a dollop of crimson and a splash of tutti-frutti mauve. It’s horrible. It clashes. Why didn’t someone force God to sit down and watch a couple of episodes of Changing Rooms before he set about butchering out sunsets like a colour-blind Umpa Lumpa. Why didn’t they persuade him that he might be better off starting with something easy, like grass, for instance. Even God couldn’t manage to fuck up grass.
After careful consideration the time it’s taken me to walk from the pub to the clock tower I’ve decided that it’s supremely selfish of Alison to desert me during the summer. It would be OK if it was winter because in the winter it’s freezing cold and therefore perfectly reasonable to stay in your flat at all times. No one need know that you spent the whole of Saturday night trimming your toenails with the blunt utensils from your Swiss Army knife and sniffing the cheesy stink off the scissors. No one would ever guess that you spent the whole of Christmas on your own, chewing the hard end of a Bernard Matthews turkey roast and watching repeats of Morecambe and Wise with a piece of damp tinsel wrapped round your head.
The summer is different, though. A bloke needs to have a girlfriend in the summer: someone to go on holiday with;
someone to go up to the lido with; someone to walk up to Alexandra Palace and watch the tasteless city sunsets with.
(It should also be noted that girlfriends come in very useful for helping you choose swimming trunks that don’t make you look like a child molester. I thought my navy-blue sixth-form Speedos were fine. The material was a little worn in places and they were a tad on the small side but otherwise they seemed perfectly good. Apparently not.)
It’s almost nine o’clock and the entire population of Crouch End seems to be outside: people unwinding with bottles of Chinese beer in front of the World Cafe, girls tumbling out of newly opened cocktail bars with skimpy clothes stuck to their hot skin, and lines of tactile couples wandering out of Oddbins, loaded down with wine and Pimms and bottles of ice-cold lemonade. Everyone seems to be enjoying themselves; relishing the one week in every year when Crouch End actually begins to feel like a village.
People (estate agents mostly) often describe Crouch End as having a villagey atmosphere, but it’s not really true. Most of the time it looks like any other tatty suburban town centre: small Boots, grotty Woolworths, a couple of bakers serving up bread and birthday cakes and sugary torpedo shaped buns, and a handful of homeless teenagers selling The Big Issue and begging for spare change next to the building-society cash points It’s quite ugly, really: double decker engines breathing petrol fumes across the dirty pavements, a dozen crappy hairdressers perfecting bubble perms and Essex-girl highlights; cheap lingerie shops selling pushup bras and genuine nylon knickers; and a slew of interior design shops peddling overpriced junk to people who wish they could afford to live down the road in Islington.
Except for tonight. Tonight the air is bathtub warm and filled with chatter and the whole place feels relaxed and friendly and open: Indian restaurants filling the leafy streets with the scent of hot smoke and cardamom, overfed cats
spreading their legs and bellies to the warm pavements and a handful of tiny cafes with their polished picture windows gaping wide open to the breeze.
It’s always like this in London. One sun-scorched evening and the whole city takes on the expression of a child who’s been allowed to stay up late for the very first time.
It’s another slow night in the video shop: a couple of nervous teenagers trawling the shelves for hardcore Kostas sends them home with a copy of Confessions of a Window Cleaner - a girl looking for a copy of Die Hard 3 - Kostas packs her off to Blockbuster and a bloke in a leather waistcoat looking for some Dogme ‘95.
I work through the evening on autopilot. I tidy the stockroom, help Kostas lock up the shop and call in at the Seven Eleven for some beers and a cheese-and-potato pasty on my way home. It’s humid outside. The breeze has dropped to almost nothing and the air feels thick and moist, like hot fog.
There’s a small pile of letters waiting in the communal entrance hall when I get home and I pick them up, grab the local paper and shuffle up the three flights of narrow stairs to the flat. I’m trying to be quiet but every second stair always manages to sound like it’s in pain no matter how gently I tread on it. I know Mr. Dunn (our downstairs neighbour) will come out and give me a bollocking in the morning, but there’s not much I can do about it now. He’s a miserable man. I can hear him snoring through the floorboards every night while I’m watching the TV. I can smell the fat from his Sunday pork and the gills from his Monday fish and I hear him arguing with his shrewish, gam my-eyed wife every morning before she goes off to work. And he’s always shouting at his dog. His nasty, snappy, smelly Scottie dog. “Naughty boy, Robbie,” he says, ‘naughty boy.”