Stories We Could Tell (21 page)

‘My dad liked Elvis,’ she said, shouting over Kool and the Gang. ‘I remember watching him as a little girl – the films, you know, they would show them on Sunday afternoons. And he always seemed to be either in Hawaii or the army.’ She smiled, and Leon’s heart fell away. ‘I thought he was a film star – like Steve McQueen or something. Clint Eastwood. Like that. I never realised he’s a
singer.’
Then her lovely eyes brimmed with grief, as though all those Sundays watching Elvis films with her dad were gone for ever. ‘That he
was
a singer, I mean.’

Leon nodded enthusiastically, leaning close to her so she could hear, his mouth just inches from that face.

‘We have a strange relationship with the music that our parents love,’ he said, and she thought about it, smiled politely, and Leon cursed himself – why do you always have to try to say something clever? Now she thinks you’re a pretentious wanker!

‘Oh, I know what you mean,’ she said. ‘Because my mum likes Frankie Vaughan so I always sort of liked Frankie Vaughan.’

And when the talking was done, Leon did this impossible thing – he danced. Leon danced, and the world slipped away. He danced, forgetting about the Leni and the Riefenstahls gig he was meant to be reviewing, forgetting about the copies of
Red Mist
– abandoned on a table sticky with spilled alcohol – and almost but not quite forgetting about the Dagenham Dogs who were hunting him down. They would never find him in here. He would be safe in the Goldmine.

So Leon forgot about everything except the music and the dancing and the most beautiful girl in the world.

Leon danced – which in his case was a modest bobbing movement, his head nodding thoughtfully under his trilby, the index finger on his right hand raised, as if he was about to make an important point – but nobody cared! That was the glorious thing about the Goldmine. Nobody cared if you were cool, or doing the
right thing, or just treating dancing as though it was another form of breathing! That’s what he liked – oh, he really liked it – about this place.

It was its own kind of underground. He could see that. There were the dancers and the hard men and the peacocks, all with their own rituals. But they left a little space for someone like Leon. He could sense that there was room for a non-dancing nerd such as himself. You just needed the confidence to take that giant step on to the dance floor. But Leon found that it was like stepping off a cliff. Once you had done it, there was no going back.

Dancing – which to Leon had always seemed as physically impossible as flying – seemed like a normal part of human endeavour in the Goldmine. He danced through the anxious, frazzled feeling you get after one line of speed and no more, he danced through his come-down, and he danced out the other side.

Leon danced to records he had never heard – this wonderful music! Full of thick, meaty funk and strings as light as gossamer and voices that were as ecstatic as some heavenly choir – singers who could really sing, voices trained in church choirs and on street corners – and he was totally in thrall to the face of the girl in front of him. She stunned him. She paralysed him. Just being in the presence of that face made him pause, his tongue tied with self-consciousness. But she made it easy for him.

During a break in the dancing, when they went to the bar for a screwdriver (him) and a Bacardi and coke (her), she was just so unaffected and natural that his tongue, like his feet, could not stay tied for ever.

‘Autumn Gold brings out a person’s bones,’ she said, and it turned out that’s what she knew about, that’s how she earned a living – cutting, crimping and dyeing in a salon called Hair Today. She gently lifted the brim of his hat to consider the merits of Autumn Gold. Leon took a half-step back.

‘Oh, come on,’ she said, smiling in that way she had. Leon couldn’t tell if she was flirting or just being nice. ‘Don’t be shy.’ ‘Okay,’ Leon said, grinning like a loon.

And then – how easy she made it seem – Leon found himself following the most beautiful girl in the world back to her natural habitat. Back to the dance floor.

And time just slipped away, time was meaningless out here. Lights struck the crystal globe slowly twirling on the ceiling, throwing flashes of colour across a face he knew he would remember on his deathbed.

She danced with this gentle swaying motion – taking small steps on high heels – almost not moving at all – but somehow it looked to Leon like
great dancing
– her hair falling in her face, then shaken away with a smile, a secret smile, as if she had just remembered where she was, as if something mildly amusing had just occurred to her. She was perfect. Much better than Cybill Shepherd, Leon decided.

And there was this other thing – she was inseparable from the music. Leon danced for the first time in his life and those incredible songs – tales of a world devastated, or made complete, because of one love – would be impossible to hear again without thinking of that fabulous face.

‘If I
can’t have you…I don’t want nobody, baby
…
If I can’t have you…oh-oh-OH!’

‘Here,’ said the most beautiful girl in the world. ‘Have you got a cold?’

Leon didn’t want to lie to her.

‘No,’ he said. ‘No, I’ve been taking drugs.’

She raised her eyebrows. He was terrified she was going to turn away. For the first time that night, he knew real fear. The fear of never seeing her again.

‘Oh, you shouldn’t take drugs,’ she said. ‘You’re not yourself when you take drugs.’

Leon had never thought of it like that. And he suddenly realised that there was something he desperately needed to know.

‘What’s your name?’ Leon said, when what he meant was – may I love you for ever?

And she told him.

Terry felt like a tourist in his own life.

The factory hadn’t changed. The metallic rumbling from the guts of the place, like some great ship in the night, the reek of malted barley and juniper berries that turned your stomach.

And he wondered what would happen to her stuff. In the past, breaking up was easy. The girls he had known lived with their parents. When it ended there was nothing to sort out. You went your separate ways and then, months later, you maybe saw them with some other guy and an engagement ring. Seen in a park, glimpsed in a car, and then gone. It was more complicated when you lived together. There was all this
stuff
to sort out.

Her bags full of camera equipment, rolls of film, contact sheets, big cardboard boxes with ILFORD printed on the front. Her records by Nick Drake and Tim Buckley and Patti Smith. Her coffee-table books of Weegee and Jacques-Henri Lartigue and Dorothea Lange. Floaty dresses, skimpy pants, big boots. Some cracked tableware from Habitat. It had all arrived at Terry’s bedsit stuffed into her father’s Ford Capri, taking up every inch of the boot and the back seat and the passenger seat. Terry wiped his eyes, staring up at the factory. He supposed that her things would leave the way they had arrived. He didn’t want to see it. He didn’t want to be around for that.

He remembered the night she had moved in. The evening had begun the way every evening seemed to begin as 1976 became 1977 – with a trip to see a band. It was a few weeks after being on the road with Billy Blitzen. A few weeks after the midnight knock on his door. He was trying to stop thinking about her. They
had both gone back to their lives in London. She had her married boyfriend, he had his one-night stands and his friends. There was plenty to do. Terry never stayed home. There was nothing to stay home for.

‘Grab your kaftan,’ he told Ray one night. ‘I am going to take you to see some new music you’ll love.’

At the foot of the tower there was a dusty little shop that sold sad souvenirs to the few tourists who made it across the river to Southwark Cathedral. Terry and Ray saw Leon in there, arguing with the Asian owner, pointing at a sun-bleached T-shirt in the window.

‘But you can’t
sell
this rubbish – it’s racist,’ Leon was saying. ‘Do you understand?’

The offending item was designed to look like a band’s promotional T-shirt. ‘Adolf Hitler – European Tour: 1939 to 1945’, it said, and under a picture of Hitler looking pleased with himself there was a list of countries resembling dates on a tour. ‘Poland, France, Holland, Italy, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Rumania, Russia.’

‘This only fashion,’ protested the owner. Only trendy.’

‘It’s not remotely trendy!’

‘You bad for business,’ the owner said. ‘You a trouble boy. You get out shop.’

‘Come on, trouble boy,’ Terry said, taking his arm. ‘I’m going to take you to see some new music you will love.’

They caught the tube to the Hammersmith Odeon where Terry’s name was on the door plus one. He talked to the press officer from Mercury and managed to get a plus two. And it was a great night – Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, one of the few bands they could all agree on. Fast and furious enough for Terry, jangly and long-haired enough for Ray, and enough like Dylan to keep Leon happy. They punched the air and sang along to ‘American Girl’ and ‘Breakdown’ and ‘Hometown Blues’ and ‘Anything That’s Rock and Roll’ and even though Terry said that the
real
Heartbreakers were Johnny Thunders’ band, there was something beautiful about this
lot – it sounded like the kind of thing they would have heard on the pirate radio stations of their childhoods, but it was undeniably new music. In a black cab back to Terry’s bedsit, the three of them argued all the way.

‘It’s too trad for me, Dad,’ Leon said, and the other two jeered at him because the little fucker had been screaming ‘American Girl’ louder than any of them.

‘But you hate hippies,’ Ray said to Terry as they trudged down the musty hall to the six-quid-a-week bedsit. ‘You hate all hippies!’

‘I like lots of hippies,’ Terry insisted. ‘And Tom Petty’s not a hippy.’

‘Name me one hippy you like,’ Ray said, turning on the electric fire in Terry’s room. They would be here all night now. Talking about music, listening to music. Drinking vodka until it ran out, smoking until the cigarettes were all gone. Maybe grabbing an hour or two’s kip just before dawn, and then catching the bus to
The Paper
.

‘John Sebastian,’ Terry said. ‘I love John Sebastian.’

‘The Lovin’ Spoonful,’ Ray said. ‘Looked a bit like John Lennon.’

‘One of the greatest songwriters of all time,’ Terry said. ‘“Didn’t Want to Have to Do It,” “Summer in the City,” “Nashville Cats,” “Younger Girl”.’ He cracked open a bottle of Smirnoff and poured shots into three filthy teacups. ‘Incredible writer. “Do You Believe in Magic?” “Rain on the Roof” – I love this geezer! He’s better than Dylan!’

‘Oh, bollocks, he is,’ Leon said, kicking off his DMs and lying down on Terry’s mattress.

“‘Warm Baby,” “Never Goin’ Back”,’ Terry said. ‘One of those Americans who fell in love with the Beatles but never stopped loving their own music. Blues, country – it’s all in the mix, buried deep. And he slept with thirteen women at Woodstock.’

Leon sat up, impressed at last. ‘Who did? John Sebastian? Thirteen in three days?’

Terry nodded. ‘Had sex with thirteen women at Woodstock and still had time to perform a solo set.’ He began excitedly flipping through his record collection. ‘And then, when the Lovin Spoonful was over, John Sebastian was still writing great songs, when he was a working musician, a writer for hire. He wrote this great song for the Everly Brothers – “Stories We Could Tell”. All about being on the road and sitting on a bed in a motel and talking about all the things you’ve seen and done. The Everly Brothers did an okay version – but John Sebastian’s version, that’s the one…’

Terry dug out a battered old album called
Tarzana Kid
. The vinyl was scratched and worn, and when Terry put the needle on the track he wanted, Ray could tell that this was a record that had been loved. They all had records like that. And the three of them sat there listening to this understated little song, slide guitars sighing under John Sebastian’s voice, and Ray thought that it was the best song he had ever heard about friendship.

Then there was a knock on the door.

It was the guy down the hall, the manager of a couple of unsigned bands. Misty was behind him, breathless and laughing and lugging a tatty suitcase. They all helped her to carry her things in, even the guy from down the hall, because Misty was the kind of girl who men did those things for, and Terry did his best to hide his surprise that she had suddenly decided to move in without feeling the need to talk about it. They sat around awkwardly when all her things were in, and then Ray and Leon finished their drinks and slipped away.

And later, after she had cried for a bit, and they had made love and she had fallen into an exhausted sleep, he saw the marks on her body, all these dark marks on her arms and legs, just about visible
in the light seeping into his bedsit, bruises in the moonlight.

He had seen marks like that in Newcastle, the first night, and he had even asked her about them, and believed her when she said, ‘I mark easily, I just bumped myself,’ because he wanted to. It was too hard to think of anything else. But now he could see that they were not the marks you get from bumping yourself, no matter how easily you bruise.

Nobody knew they were together then. Apart from Ray and Leon, nobody knew. Not until Terry went into the picture editor’s office the next day and hit Acid Pete so hard that he broke Acid Pete’s jaw and two of the fingers on his right hand. Then they knew.

Minutes later, in the office of Kevin White, woozy with the pain in his smashed hand, the editor was almost in tears of frustration and anger, asking Terry how he could do anything but sack him.

‘I can’t stand it when men knock around women,’ Terry said. They stared at each other for a long while. ‘For whatever reason,’ Terry said.

‘Get out of my sight,’ White said, and at first Terry thought he had been fired. Then he realised he was being sent back to his desk. And he knew that he would owe Kevin White for ever.