Blowing It (11 page)

Mac would not, if he was honest, be able to claim these days that he could still put down ‘songwriter’ under the heading ‘Occupation’, even though his work still turned up on the world’s radio playlists often enough to provide a good (if alarmingly dwindling) income. He’d still have put it on his passport, if it had been required, for old times’ sake
and
for the small, rare ego-stroke of having immigration officials ask him if he’d written anything famous. He had never admitted to it for car insurance, as he knew from bitter experience that it would draw only a sharp intake of breath from the other end of the phone and either an eye-watering quote or a swift refusal on grounds of unacceptable risk. He’d always wondered exactly what it was about musicians that gave them such a reputation among insurers. It didn’t seem to matter whether you played a disciplined double bass in a symphony orchestra or were Keith Richards – apparently anyone who strung a few notes together for a living was tarred with the same wayward brush. Was it a simple matter of a collective reputation for drink, drugs and women? Did that mean that highest-level sportsmen could insure, say, a top-of-the-range Mercedes for about thirty quid simply because they tended to have early nights and a whole-food, temperate diet?

Such ramblings of thought occupied Mac as he strummed his old Martin guitar in the hanging egg-chair in the studio. It wasn’t a bad song, this new thing he was working on. He’d become very fond of it and out of the half dozen he’d demo’d in the past few months this was definitely the most promising. It was possibly heading towards being one of his best ever, or could be once it had had a bit more of a work-up. It was still at the early stage where it could go either way. He’d got the melody down with
a
basic backing track and had written some canny lyrics but it could all come to nothing if he couldn’t place it with someone capable of taking it to the dizzy heights.

Mac flicked a few switches and played back what he’d done so far, leaning back in his chair, eyes closed. Not for Robbie at all now he listened again, but certainly one of those cute girl bands could do it justice, if he could find one with a bit of an edge.

Mac yawned and stretched and clicked the computer on to the Charisma website and the link to the guestbook and recent comments. He didn’t much want to read fans’ e-mails. Frankly, there shouldn’t be any – what sort of people clung to the memory of a long-past band? Sometimes you just didn’t want to know there were all these sorry loners out there thinking they might find the meaning of life or that the reason they couldn’t get a shag was there in your old lyrics. He imagined these not-so-young men (never the not-so-young women; it seemed they moved on far more successfully from their musical pasts and were out there having a real life), holed up in stuffy bedrooms that smelled of socks and french fries. He saw them Googling as if their lives depended on it, imagining a teeny fleck of stardust would descend on them if they got an e-mail through to their ageing hero who might, if their query had been entertainingly enough phrased, send a personal reply. Mac rarely did – it was a mistake he’d made in the eager early internet days
when
he’d felt bound by politeness not to ignore questions that seemed innocently enough asked. That way lay the stalkers and loons who questioned whether a comma accidentally inserted into a new print-out of lyrics was ‘significant’. These were the kind of crazies who’d come round and torch your car out of pique over an unanswered e-mail.

‘Is it true that “Target Practice” is being re-released?’ he read from Johnno – one of the regulars. That was the fourth time that question had come up recently. They seemed to think there might be some connection with a Keanu Reeves movie. He didn’t know where they’d got that one from. No one had told him, though he was due for a meeting with Doug, the band’s former manager, in a couple of weeks. Why didn’t these people have better things to do?

Feeling unaccountably grumpy, Mac closed down the computers, locked up the studio and went off towards the long border. There were tomatoes to feed, lettuces to thin out … a journey to plan. He looked back at the H-shaped house from the far side of the terrace. There were rooms on the top floor he hadn’t been in for at least a couple of years. Each wing on its own could accommodate an entire family at a push. Part of the first-floor area was equipped with a perfect, barely used Smallbone kitchen
circa
1987 from when Clover had gone through her late-teen phase of wanting a separate (though bills-paid) life. Sorrel hadn’t wanted it –
she
liked her snug, messy lair way up under the east gable. Whatever were he and Lottie doing now, rattling around in a seven-bedroom, five-bathroom house? When Sorrel had gone on her travels, and then presumably to university, the two of them might just as well move into the studio and let the rest of the place fall into the landscape. Or be a fabulous family home for someone else. It felt right, this idea of selling and moving on. Time to go, he thought, testing out whether this made him feel sorrowful. It didn’t. In fact, he could feel his spirits instantly lift at the very idea. Wonder if Lottie will think of phoning estate agents? he thought, tramping on towards the vegetables.

‘They’ll be biting your hand off. You’ll have agents queuing down past the primary school once they know your house is up for sale.’

It was reassuring to have friends like Susie, a person who always saw only the upside of life. Lottie, enjoying a lunchtime glass of white wine in the stockroom at the back of Susie’s gallery, was very much in need of this kind of reassurance.

‘It’s not the agents I want queuing – it’s buyers. I think they’ll take one look inside the front door and run a mile. I know I would. There’s so much
stuff
.’

‘Rubbish! It’s only a matter of …’

Susie hesitated and Lottie leaped in, laughing. ‘See – even you have your doubts! I know what it takes to get the punters interested; I’ve watched all
those
property programmes where some know-all breezes in and says, “Hey look, this place will be fine if you simply get absolutely every surplus item out and paint it all cream and caramel.” Holbrook just is not a cream-and-caramel kind of house. And what are they going to make of the black walls in the sitting room?’

Susie was a woman who, decor-wise, could spend an hour on the exact arrangement of one single perfect dahlia and a pebble. That she would allow more than one painting at a time on the walls of her gallery was ever a surprise to her friends. When Lottie had owned it, the place had been an absolute crash of colours – the more vibrant the better. Artists soon came to know that if they wanted her to sell their work, there was no point in turning up with a selection of gloomy, doomy offerings. No wonder it hadn’t done too well in her hands – she hadn’t exactly catered for all tastes. Susie, on the other hand, was doing brilliantly. She understood the terms subtle, minimal and pared-down – perfect for Surrey. She certainly understood cream and caramel – it was a standard she lived by and dressed by – and was not a person who would fully comprehend the vast task Lottie faced. If a fire broke out in Susie’s house she would be ready to climb out of her bedroom window with a small bag of essential cosmetics and a capsule wardrobe by the time the firemen had got their ladder up.

‘I was going to say,’ Susie went on, ‘that it’s
probably
just a simple matter of hiring people to do a thorough tidy-up. Surely it wouldn’t take much more than that? What about that wonderful cleaner you’ve got?’

‘Ah well, Mrs Howard has her routine,’ Lottie told her. ‘She’s brilliant with the vacuum cleaner and floor polish but would definitely think helping to sort thirty years of accumulated possessions a responsibility too far. And she’d be right really – I mean only Mac and I and the family can decide what to keep and what to chuck. We’ll have to get a skip. Possibly two. Do they come in fleets?’

Susie looked as if she didn’t quite understand, but then she was a woman whose holiday photos actually made it into albums rather than being bundled into a drawer for the kind of sorting out that comes under ‘one day, when there’s time’. Lottie bit her lip. That was just the photos she’d thought of. You had to multiply that by the children’s entire school art-work output, the cupboards full of old fabric from the time she’d thought (wrongly) faux-vintage silk dresses were going to be the next fashion must-have and a room crammed full of books that were quite possibly being eaten away by some kind of paper moth.

She took a large, comforting gulp of wine as Susie continued brightly, ‘And once everything’s sorted, well, then you could have a look at what you really need and what you don’t and carry on from there.’

Lottie sighed, feeling the burden of the word
‘sorted’
. Easy to say, another thing to achieve. It would take months. And by then, the momentum would all be lost. Mac would have settled into winter mode, curling up like a cat in the warm studio in the afternoons with a guitar and a seed catalogue and possibly a vague plan for yet another career-change. No – that wasn’t going to happen.

Lottie swigged down the last of her wine and stood up. ‘Right. Nothing’s going to happen unless it happens – I’m going down to Digby, James and Humphreys to talk house sales. It’s time to take out that half page in
Country Life
.’

EIGHT

ILEX DIDN’T MIND
hanging out in the pub at lunchtime with Simon from the office but the incredibly slow pace at which he liked to amble along on the way back did irritate him. Perhaps it was because Simon was a bit on the short side, smaller steps and all that, though it couldn’t be the whole reason. Manda was about the same height but perfectly capable of getting along at a cracking pace even if she was wearing serious heels.

‘Listen, I do have to get back pretty quickly today.’ Ilex tried to gee him up. ‘I’ve got those Pilgrim Prospect guys coming to see me about putting their new riverside block on the market.’ He looked at his watch and wondered how rude it would be to gallop on ahead, leaving Simon to wander along gazing into shop windows at his own reflection and fiddling with his upswept executive hairstyle.

‘Oh yeah – marketing advice. The stuff we’re
supposed
to be good at.’ Simon laughed with little sincerity. ‘Got some new ideas lined up?’

Ilex shrugged. ‘Nothing new. It’s all been done to death, all those developments with show-off gyms and parking for the must-have second Porsche. There’s no original angle left that I can come up with if the advertising bods can’t. If I hear one more twat in a Paul Smith suit and over-gelled hair banging on about “buying into the lifestyle” I’m going to have to deck him.’

Simon slowed even more and flicked a look at himself in Starbucks’ window. If ever there was a guy who would nominate himself as the Ideal Date, this was surely your man, Ilex thought. Did he spend hours in front of his bathroom mirror, telling himself how adorable he was? Still, Ilex considered him an easy enough office companion. He didn’t complain or smell or upset the women. He could talk football but was not obsessed. And he was good at his job, though not so good that he was going to overtake Ilex for any promotion that might be going. So he was all right really, Ilex conceded, trying once more to force up the walking pace.

‘They’re aiming at the wrong market, that’s where they’re falling down,’ he said. ‘They’re still on that thing of going for the young city types, as if they’re the loaded ones.’

‘Well, aren’t they?’

‘Not any more, not the new lot. Life’s too expensive for them now. This new wave are all
stuck
with student debts, expensive social lives and a taste for lots of hot, boozy holidays. It’s the older market they should be going for, would be my opinion, if anyone would listen. Our parents’ generation.’

Ilex was convinced this was true and was absolutely certain he could offload an entire block of glass and concrete double-height duplexes onto the newly retired baby-boomer generation if a developer would just give him total charge of the advertising budget. With that, plus a couple of paragraphs of editorial in the weekend property supplements, he’d be willing to bet serious money he’d have sold signs stuck to every window in the Pilgrim development within a week. And there you’d have it, a block full of ageing ravers, cultivating connoisseur cannabis in garden-centre gro-bags on the wrap-around terrace and annoying the crap out of passers-by, playing Free, Led Zeppelin and Jimi Hendrix at top volume.

Simon was looking doubtful. ‘Yeah, but how do you pitch the market? For a start, you’d have to do the photo-shoot all different. Strip out the pink suede sofas and shagging rugs and bring in the floral chintz.’ He laughed. ‘And they’d want net curtains!’

Ilex gave him a pitying look. ‘Do you really think people who were young in the sixties are really net-curtain types? Can you see Mick Jagger with net curtains? Even I know better than that.’

It was depressing, the stereotyping that went on.
Older
people had big, expensive properties to trade in. (Look at his own parents and their half-arsed travel plans, which reminded him – they hadn’t called him yet for advice about the sale. If they were going to ask anyone about sorting it, surely it should be him?) It was older ones whose families had grown and flown who were ripe for persuasion to downsize that old five-bed villa in the outer suburbs, move further into town where the getting about was easier and cheaper and have change of a six-figure sum, no problem. But it wasn’t sexy enough for the big boys wondering what to do with their surplus, unsold buildings. Oh no. Whenever the term ‘grey pound’ came up everyone under forty simply shut down their brains. Pink pound, yes, that always pressed the right cash-register buttons. That was good, with its associations of skincare for boys, hip designs and lots of child-free spending power. Grey pound was bad – think inadequate pensions, incontinence pads, stairlifts and the smell of boiled cabbage. Wrong, wrong, wrong. Perhaps he was in the wrong job. Maybe his parents had the right idea and he and Manda should just chuck it all in and take off round the world too.