Stories We Could Tell (29 page)

She was waiting for him when he went back to the room. She was in the pose that was designed to inflame him, the position that he would have favoured, if there had been any choice in the matter. On the edge of the bed, her clothes off, her legs crossed, leaning back.

But the thing that made Terry’s blood freeze was that she was shooting up.

Grace had not hoovered the white lines up her nose as he had expected. She had produced her works – the needle, the belt tied tight around her upper arm – and as he came into the room to see his fantasy made flesh, his dream girl was searching for a vein, then finding it, and gasping – panting – with pleasure at the act of penetration, the spike entering her vein, the cooked-up speed quickly finding her bloodstream.

In a daze, Terry declined the mumbled invitation to join her shooting up, to share the dripping needle, as if he was refusing an extra ginger nut at tea, and he watched her writhing with pleasure – arching her back, closing her eyes, exhaling with a kind of euphoric disbelief – and he knew it was far more pleasure than he could ever give her.

He didn’t really want anything after that – not the drugs, not the girl, and certainly not any part of the act before him. Needles scared the shit out of him. But he was young and it was too late to stop and he had always wanted to get the girl that everyone wanted.

So he tore his clothes off and fell upon her on that lumpy mattress in that leaky bedsit, more in desperation than enthusiasm, her thin white body still and doped beneath him, her needle sharing their bed and glinting in the Christmas lights, almost festive.

The night was almost over.

From the window of the editor’s office, Terry could see the sky above the old dying docks streaking with light. Somewhere a tug made its mournful sound. Twenty-one storeys below, beyond the hermetically sealed, suicide-proof windows, he could see the river black and glittering, most of the city still sleeping, but already there were the lights of the first cars on the Embankment.

Not long now.

Terry went back to his office and did a line of speed at his desk. He liked being in White’s office, but he didn’t want to take drugs in there. It would have felt disrespectful. He rocked in his swivel chair, staring at the images on their three walls. High up on his own wall, Norman Mailer’s battered face caught Terry’s eye.

He had heard this story about Mailer on the eve of his last wedding, and it had stuck with him. Mailer was depressed about walking down the aisle the next day. His future wife asked him what was wrong, and Mailer said that he had never wanted this – marriage, monogamy, fusing his life with one other life. All Mailer had ever wanted was to be a free man in Paris. And his future wife said – now look, Norman. If you were a free man in Paris you would eventually meet one special girl and end up exactly where you are today. And Norman Mailer saw that this was true. And so
did Terry. In those brief moments of freedom that came your way, you were always looking for a way to
not
be free, to belong totally to someone. You went looking for new worlds, and then you found them in just one face. Terry found Misty. Now he had lost her, and now he was free again.

He did another line, and then he got up and wandered through the dark empty rooms of the office, and he was soon rummaging around in the filing cabinets, thumbing through photo files and bound back issues, soaking up the incredible history of the place.
Jimmy Savile says ‘Hi there’ to all readers
of The Music Paper
and wishes one and all a Merry Xmas and a great 1968 – ‘See you in
The People
every Sunday, guys ‘n’ girls.’

It was like being locked in a museum after hours, he thought. During the day
The Paper
was a constant round of work, play and music, of spats, spliffs, and strange new sounds blaring from the review room. Kevin White and the older guys shouting for the dummy. A constant procession of faces old and new – freelancers, musicians, PRs – looking for feature work or publicity, who were often willing to settle for free drugs or lunch or a gig doing 300 words on the Vibrators at Dingwalls.

During the day maybe you would walk into someone’s office and there would be Joan Jett sitting on a desk, batting her eyelashes and asking you for a light. Or maybe a couple of writers would be arguing about the merits of a record that came out years ago – on Terry’s first day, he had seen two of the older guys almost come to slaps about
Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
. Or maybe some female freelancer and one of the older guys would be having a quick joint, cuddle or debate about the new Steely Dan record in the stationery cupboard. That was the day. But at night everyone was gone. Well, almost everyone.

Terry looked in the window of the review room. Skip Jones was still in there, writing in his agonised, left-handed longhand, surrounded by that strange garden, the small forest of forgotten
cigarettes resting on their filter tips, the cones of ash long and wilting but curiously undisturbed. Terry tapped lightly on the glass. Skip looked up, smiled shyly, nodded.

‘Terry Warboys, wild,’ he said, dog tired now, the night nearly gone, and with hours of writing behind him.

Terry came into the review room. Shy too. Skip Jones still meant so much to him. Because, because – Skip was just the best there had ever been.

‘Not going home, Skip?’

Skip shook his head, looking at a point somewhere above Terry’s shoulder. It occurred to Terry that Skip had no place to go tonight.

‘Might as well stick around,’ Skip said. ‘It’s going to be a busy day.’

Terry nodded. ‘Because of Elvis, right? I guess White will want some sort of special for the new issue.’ He was shocked to see how pale-faced and frail Skip seemed. But then again, Terry knew he probably didn’t look too rosy-cheeked and hearty himself. ‘You going to write something about Elvis, Skip?’

Skip shrugged. ‘Maybe. Might write something about the early days at Sun. Sam Phillips and the boy in the red shirt who wanted to record a song for Mama. “Good Rocking Tonight” and dreams of being a truck driver. All that.’ Skip smiled at a point above Terry’s shoulder. ‘Not sure I want to be part of the whole, uh,
canonisation
process. Not sure it’s right. We haven’t had a good word to say about Elvis since he went into the army. Now we’re going to turn him into – I don’t know what – Lenin’s preserved corpse in Red Square or something. Know what I mean?’

Terry nodded, pulling out his Marlboros. He had no fucking idea what Skip meant. Rock stars died and then you loved them more than ever. Brian Jones. Jimi Hendrix. Jim Morrison. That’s the way it had always been. But he thought of Billy Blitzen, alone and strung-out in the Western World, and for the first time Terry
glimpsed something beyond the eternal glory of rock-and-roll martyrdom. He saw the waste.

‘Thanks, man,’ Skip said as Terry offered him his last cigarette. Skip lit up, dragged deeply and then carefully set the Marlboro on its filter tip, immediately forgetting it. Terry stared at it hungrily. ‘Rock and roll is turning into museum culture now,’ said Skip. ‘Like jazz or painting. You know? The canon exists, and all we can do is stand back and admire it. When Miles Davis and Picasso have come and gone – or Elvis and Dylan – what more can you say?’

Terry picked up the album cover in front of Skip. ‘What about this lot? Television?’

‘A footnote,’ Skip sighed. ‘A glorious footnote, a magnificent footnote, but a footnote all the same. Who’s going to be on the cover next week?’

Terry scratched his head. ‘Elvis? Got to be Elvis.’

‘Young Elvis. Elvis in 1956. Elvis with the sap rising. White’s not going to put the Elvis of 1977 on the cover. No fringed jumpsuits. No Las Vegas glitz. No middle-age paunch. It’s going to be Elvis when he was a skinny kid with everything before him. It’s going to look like something great, but it will be just another nail in the coffin.’

Terry thought about it. ‘What coffin?’

‘The coffin with our music in it,’ Skip said. ‘The coffin of rock and roll.’ The Marlboro standing upright on the desk was glowing red. Skip picked it up and inhaled deeply, running his bony fingers through matted bird’s-nest hair. ‘Don’t get stuck in rock and roll, man,’ Skip told Terry. ‘People are starting to treat it like the civil service – a job for life. It was never
meant
to be a job for life.’ Skip smiled, glanced at Terry then looked away. ‘But I thought you were hanging out with Dag tonight.’

‘Ah,’ Terry said, attempting to laugh off his mangled heart. ‘That didn’t work out so good.’

Skip nodded thoughtfully. ‘Well, Dag can be hard to handle. He takes whatever he can get his hands on. Starts acting crazy.’

‘It wasn’t that,’ Terry said. ‘Nothing to do with taking stuff.’ He paused, studied the cover of
Marquee Moon
that was still in his hands. ‘Well, in a way. Misty – she sort of went off with him.’

Skip thought about it. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Okay, man. Dag and Misty. Wild.’

‘I thought he was my friend,’ Terry said, trying to laugh and finding it choke somewhere halfway up his throat. ‘In Berlin

‘He’s not your friend, man,’ Skip said, suddenly full of feeling. ‘Dag’s not your friend. Doesn’t matter how well you got along with him when you were on the road. Dag’s a
rock star
, man. You could know him for twenty years and he still wouldn’t be your friend. Not really. Not the way that Ray and Leon are your friends. Or even Billy. Because you give Dag one teeny-fucking-weeny bad review, and you would be
out
man, and you would
never
be allowed back in. You can be
friendly
with these guys – especially guys your own age, who start out when you do. Bit harder with someone like Dag, who’s been around the block a few times already, but you can still be friendly with him. You can be friendly with the guys your own age because when it all changes, and it stops being about loving music and starts being about other stuff, about egos and limos, and blow-jobs from skinny models, part of you still remembers when you were all just starting out and all you wanted to do was talk about music and meet girls and you couldn’t even get into the fucking Speakeasy. But sooner or later you have to decide if you’re a writer, man, or just a groupie who can type.’

Skip sounded bitter now, and Terry thought of the file on him in the photo library. There were photographs of all the writers on
The Paper
, pictures used to accompany their by-line mug shots mostly, but Skip Jones had a file all to himself. Terry had often pored over those pictures on his nights wandering the deserted office, because Skip was the reason he was here, Skip had lived the
life he had dreamed of when he was a music-mad kid working in a gin factory, rushing out with his eighteen pence every Wednesday to buy
The Paper
a day early.

Pictures of Skip. There was Skip with Keith Richards in a sundrenched villa in the south of France. Skip with Iggy Pop in a destroyed hotel room in Detroit. Skip with Dag Wood in the dingy gloom of the dressing room at the Roundhouse. And here Skip was tonight – friend of the stars, the finest music writer of his generation, of any generation – killing time in a little review room, no place to rest his brilliant head, his famous friends all gone. Then Skip chuckled to himself as if it was all a bit of a joke after all.

‘Wild. Old Dag doesn’t change. Tried to fuck your girlfriend, did he?’

‘Well, I think he probably has by now,’ Terry said, his smile faltering, his spirits sinking at the thought of that enormous barnacle-encrusted todger being unleashed from Dag’s leather trousers and pointed at Misty. ‘More than once.’

‘I wouldn’t be so sure,’ Skip smiled, setting down his cigarette so that he could fish around in his pocket. ‘You never know with Dag if he is going to shoot you up or bugger you sideways or just fall asleep.’ His smile vanished. ‘But we have to be realistic, man. That chick has probably just had the best loving of her life.’

Terry’s spirits sank twenty floors. The best loving of her life? How could he compete with that?

Skip stared Terry right in the eye. It was only for a moment, and the eye contact jolted Terry, but it was real. He hadn’t imagined it. Skip Jones had looked him in the eye.

‘The question is,’ Skip said, ‘what are you going to do about it?’

Terry shuffled his feet. ‘Well, I don’t know. What
can
I do?’

Skip pulled out an assortment of pills, and began rifling through them. When he held out his hand to Terry, there were a dozen different-coloured capsules in his palm.

‘You give these to Dag,’ Skip said. ‘With my compliments.’

Terry stared at the pills. ‘What are they?’

‘You give these to Dag and it will be a while before he fucks your girlfriend again. Or anybody else’s.’

‘Ex-girlfriend,’ Terry scowled. ‘She’s not my girlfriend any more. Are you kidding? She’s nothing to me.’

But he took the pills from Skip Jones, and stuffed them in the pocket of his dead man’s mohair jacket, as if perhaps she was still something after all.

Leon dreamed of Bambi.

Strange, he had always thought, that the world considered the little deer to be Walt Disney at its most saccharine. To Leon,
Bambi
had always seemed like the first snuff movie.

He had been taken to see the film at the Swiss Cottage Odeon when he was five years old, and he had found it such a deeply traumatic experience that his mother had to lead him trembling and tearful to the lobby well before the final credits.

How could the other boys and girls just sit there chomping on their choc-ices?
Bambi
was a film where a child loses its mother, where a world bursts into flames and – the part that haunted Leon’s dreams as he lay tossing and turning and sweating inside his sleeping bag – that made tangible the horror of the moment when paradise is defiled.

He awoke with a gasp, already sitting up, and he realised immediately that it was all true. They were here at last. Bailiffs were kicking down the front door of the squat, the windows were caving in, there were men shouting, women screaming, the baby crying.