Stories We Could Tell (19 page)

‘I have never given you any assurances of an easy, or cheap, or speedy victory,’
warned Churchill. ‘
On the contrary, as you know, I have never promised anything but the hardest conditions, great disappointment and many mistakes. But I am sure that in the end all will be well for us in our island home. All will be better for the world!

And Robbie was whimpering at the top of the stairs, having retreated when the old man got physical, while his mother had Ray’s face in her small, bony hands, pulling it this way and that, making the stinging red flesh hurt even worse, and Ray told her through his tears that everything was fine.

‘You’re weak,’ said his father. It was the worst thing he could think to say. ‘You’re all gutless.’

‘And there will be that crown of honour for those that have endured and never failed which history will allow them for having set an example to the whole human race,’
said Churchill.

Ray pulled himself away from his mother’s embrace, and stumbled to the door. His mother’s kindness and concern humiliated him as much as his father’s violence. The record was spinning on an empty groove. It was over.

‘It should have been you,’ Ray’s father said, not stirring from his favourite chair, not even looking at him, just staring into the empty fireplace that they no longer used because of the central heating while the end of the record crackled and hissed. ‘He was worth ten of you. With your long hair and your drugs. Oh, you think I don’t know about that? I know all about it, my lad.
It should have been you.’

He hadn’t said it before. But it didn’t hurt Ray as much as he thought it would. Because he knew that his father had always thought it.

‘I’m going now,’ Ray said, to nobody in particular.

He opened the door, his mother on the stairs fiddling with the neck of her pink dressing gown, his little brother peering through the banisters like a pale-faced prisoner.

And as he walked back to the railway station through those comatose streets, his mouth pulsed with the smack his father had given him, his bottom lip was torn and swollen thanks to the old man, and Ray wondered if his dad would have been a better man if his life had been easier, if the dreams had all worked out. Thinking about his father made Ray think of John Winston Lennon, born on 9th October 1940 during one of the Luftwaffe’s night raids on Liverpool, and the feckless ship’s waiter, Freddy Lennon, who so soon abandoned baby John and his mother. Yes, thinking about his old man got Ray thinking about his hero, and how John grew up without the presence of a father in his life. And Ray thought – oh, you lucky, lucky bastard.

His face hurt and he knew from experience that it would hurt for a long time. Getting smacked wasn’t like the movies. In real life it was amazing how much mess your father could make of your face with just one punch.

Then his stomach seemed to rise up to his mouth and Ray had to hold on to a lamppost until he choked it down. Here was this other thing that violence did. Violence made you sick. Violence
made you feel like puking, as though just being on the wrong end of it gave you some kind of illness. Ray knew all about it. His dad had taught him.

Nobody understood why he wouldn’t cut his hair. Nobody got it. Not even Terry. Not even Leon. They didn’t understand why all the violence of the new music appalled him.

Ray thought – I can get all that at home.

Terry walked east along the great artery that links the city’s entertainment area and its financial district, the fun and the money, his DMs tramping down New Oxford Street, High Holborn, Holborn – nothing open, everything closed, apart from the odd Dunkin’ Donuts and, somewhere to the south, the meat market where his father was working through the night.

And every step of the way he thought about her.

He should have seen it coming. Should have seen the end in the beginning. That guy crying in the rain outside Terry’s bedsit, he was a married man called Acid Pete. What kind of a girl has a married man crying in the rain? What kind of a girl knocks about with someone called Acid Pete?

A girl like Misty, Terry thought. A wild girl. I should have seen the pink fake mink handcuffs and run a mile. The very first time I heard her recite some second-hand tosh about ‘exploring my sexuality’, I should have bailed out. I should have known there were too many miles on the clock when she said the doctor had told her to take a break from the pill before her ovaries exploded or something. I should have made my excuses as soon as I saw a copy of
The Female Eunuch
.

The girls he had known didn’t mess with married men, especially married men with names like Acid Pete. The girls he had known read
Cosmopolitan
, if they read anything, not seminal feminist texts. And they started taking the Pill when they started going steady, then stopped when they got married – always a white
wedding, always in church – unless they were still saving up for their first mortgage and the baby had to wait a while. They didn’t have to take a break from the Pill because they had been on it for so long.

The girls he had known might let you explore their breasts if the night was full of Blue Nun and romance, but they certainly didn’t explore their sexuality. And, without an engagement ring on their third finger left hand, they weren’t too keen on you exploring it either. Regular sex was for steady boyfriends. A blow-job was like getting eight draws on Littlewood’s football pools, and when it happened, you had to break up with the girl immediately and tell all your friends. That was a drag, because you missed the girl, but witnessing the miracle of a blow-job was just too momentous to keep to yourself.

A large part of Terry’s life felt as though it had been dedicated to trying to get a hand inside some girl’s bra in the back of some dad’s Ford Escort. It wasn’t like that with Misty.

She had her own wheels. And, being a wild girl, she never wore one.

He remembered the first time he spoke to her.

He had joined
The Paper
as the blazing summer of 1976 drew to a close, but didn’t exchange a word with her until the end of the year when he was sitting under a twinkling Christmas tree at Heathrow, rereading
The Subterraneans
, when Misty entered the airport lounge. They were meant to be doing a job together.

She was wearing one of her Alice in Wonderland dresses with a man’s jacket over the top, and even behind her mirrored aviator shades, you could see that she was crying. Really crying. Sobbing her heart out.

‘Are you all right?’ he said, closing his Kerouac and standing up. ‘I’m fine,’ she told him.

She flopped down on the hard airport chair, crying even harder,
and he sat beside her. She partially lifted the enormous sunglasses, dabbing at her eyes with a screwed-up piece of toilet paper. Terry had no idea what to say or do, so he went off and bought two plastic cups of boiling hot tea and offered one to her.

‘Never fuck a married man,’ she said, taking the tea. ‘They make a big fuss if you turn up at their home.’

Terry tried to process this information.

‘I didn’t know if you took sugar or not,’ he said. ‘So I only put one in.’

Misty took a sip of the brown liquid, flinching at the heat. ‘You’re sweet,’ she said. Then she wiped her nose with the back of her hand, sniffed loudly and seemed to brighten. ‘Any idea if our flight’s on time?’

When Terry had joined
The Paper
, Misty had seemed as distant and glamorous as a pin-up.

He saw her around the office, her cameras swinging from her neck, laughing with one of the older guys or talking to the photo editor as they looked at contact sheets of Generation X and Patti Smith and the Buzzcocks. She said hello to Ray if they bumped into each other, but stared right through Leon and Terry and avoided their office. One time Leon caught Terry watching her.

‘Way out of our league,’ Leon laughed, and Terry blushed and threw a wastepaper bin at him.

Terry learned from Ray that she was the full-time assistant and part-time girlfriend of an older photographer, a stringer for
The Paper
, a minor Sixties legend called Acid Pete who had taken pictures of Cream at the Albert Hall, the Stones in Hyde Park and Hendrix at the Isle of Wight, just before the end.

Acid Pete was a married man, and sometimes when he came by to see the photo editor his wife was in tow – Misty made herself scarce – one of those constantly smiling hippy chicks, the type who seemed both beatific and brainless. When Terry met Acid Pete in the office and shook his limp, hippy hand, Acid Pete seemed
endlessly amused, impossibly experienced and as though he had taken just a few too many drugs.

Terry was intimidated by Acid Pete. He had seen so much and taken so many great photographs, and even at an age when the Queen must be getting ready to send him a telegram – forty-one? forty-two? – he was still seeing –
screwing
, Acid Pete would have called it – the best-looking girl –
chick
, or possibly
lady
, Acid Pete would have called her – in the office. The only thing that made Acid Pete bearable for Terry was the knowledge that the older man’s glory days were gone.

Acid Pete didn’t get on with the new music, didn’t dig what he called ‘the aggressive vibe’ in places like the Western World, and soon he was seen looking forlorn in the photographers’ pit of the Roundhouse, huddled inside his greatcoat, the buttons gone, and Misty was the one who was getting the assignments. Towards the end of the year, one of them was with Terry – flying up to Newcastle to join the Billy Blitzen tour, covering two dates in Newcastle and Glasgow for a centre spread.

‘Kerouac,’ she said, drinking her tea and clocking Terry’s copy of
The Subterraneans
. ‘He’s a real
boy’s
writer, isn’t he?’ Wet-eyed and smiling now. ‘I bet
all
the writers you like are boy’s writers.’

Terry felt like one of those cartoon characters with a question mark hovering above his head. ‘What’s a boy’s writer?’

‘You know. A boy’s writer. Go on – talk me through it.’

He had no idea what she was going on about. ‘Talk you through what?’

She laughed happily. ‘Your life in books, silly.’

So he did. Or at least the ones he could recall.

‘Well, I can remember my mum reading me Rupert the Bear for hours on end. And then there are the books at school that get to you.
Treasure Island
and
Robinson Crusoe
and
Kidnapped
. And
To Kill a Mockingbird
and
My Family and Other Animals
and
Travels With My Aunt
. I loved
My Family and Other Animals
, I
wanted to live on Corfu…And then you get a bit older and you start making your own reading list – I remember lan Fleming at eleven, all the Bond books.
“The scent and smoke and sweat of a casino are nauseating at three in the morning.”
The first line in the first 007 book.’

She smiled, took off her aviator shades, nodded. Her eyes were a shade of green he had never seen before. Maybe it was the tears.

‘And then this funny period,’ he said, ‘when you’re in your early teens and you’re reading what’s supposed to be trash – Harold Robbins,
Airport, Valley of the Dolls –
and the big bestsellers –
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
and
Alive!
– and you’re also getting into Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald and J. D. Salinger and
Catch 22
and
Lolita
and Norman Mailer. And then you realise there are all these great journalists out there – Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson and…’

They called their flight. Terry felt a stab of disappointment. He enjoyed talking to her.

‘Well,’ she said, pressing his chest with her boarding card. ‘At least you like Rupert the Bear.’

‘I am going to nail that little picture snapper before she gets off the bus,’ said Billy Blitzen’s manager. ‘What’s her name? Foggy? Smoggy? Well, boys, I’m going to nail Foggy’s sweet little ass to the fucking
carpet!

The band all laughed, apart from Billy himself. They were at the sound check for the gig, and Misty hadn’t come along, had stayed at the Holiday Inn making heated calls to London. And Billy swung his guitar on his hip and led Terry to the side of the stage.

‘She with you, man?’ said Billy. ‘This Misty with you?’

He was a sweet man. A good man. Terry’s favourite musician. Because of what he had done with the Lost Boys, and because he was still great on stage. But mostly because he was the only one
who cared enough to ask Terry that simple question. But what could he say?

‘No, Billy,’ Terry said, attempting a smile. ‘Misty’s not with me.’

Billy sighed. ‘Well, I guess that’s all right then.’

Despite the Aerosmith and Kiss cassettes the band listened to on the bus, Billy Blitzen and the P45s conformed to the dress code of Max’s Kansas City and CBGBs – ties as thin as liquorice, drainpipes tighter than a coat of emulsion, second-hand suit jackets and fluffed-up Beatle cuts that could have been worn by the Byrds in 1966.

But their manager was old school, a lawyer from LA in cowboy boots who had graduated from Harvard Business School and cocaine. He had been around for years and he knew how it worked.

Now he raised his voice in the empty student hall, for Billy’s venues were getting smaller by the month, and the P45s laughed and clapped.

‘Nail her
ass
to the fucking
carpet!’

It was a great show that night – the longhaired students out of their minds on real ale as Billy mimed jamming a spike into his arm and the entire student union hall singing along to ‘Shoot Up, Everybody’.

They went back to the bar of the Holiday Inn. The band and the manager and Terry and Misty and the few local kids of both sexes who always managed to tag along, offering drugs, sex or flattery.

Terry didn’t talk to Misty. It was different on the road. They both had a job to do. And by the time he gave up, realising that she was not for him, the drugs were all gone, the bartender had started mixing the screwdrivers with orange cordial, and Misty was in a corner talking to the LA cowboy.