Nico (3 page)

‘Hiya, Jim, what's er …' He looked around. ‘Who's er … where's er … ?'

I shrugged my shoulders and mimed a shot in the arm.

He nodded, flipped open his Bensons, threw me one, and settled into the
Daily Mirror
.

‘Know'ow many dates we're doin'?' he asked, snorting a line of bathtub speed.

‘All I know is, it's two weeks in Italy, the Dr Demetrius sunshine break.'

He offered me the rolled £5 note. I shook my head. He snorted the other line.

‘Wur is'e then, physician ter the famous?'

‘Gone to find a phone. He's trying to locate someone called Raincoat.'

‘Raincoat?'

‘Yes. I'm sure that was his name … the sound engineer.'

Toby laughed. ‘I know Raincoat … “sound engineer” is it now? Last week'e wur a ladies' 'airdresser.' He carried on laughing until he began to cough up his smoker's phlegm, which he spat out the window.

(‘One in rags,

And one in jags …')

‘Toby … Toby,' waved the children.

After an hour of chainsmoking smalltalk we decided it might be a good idea if we at least set up the instruments.

The rehearsal room was, in effect, Echo's spare bedroom, a place to hide from conjugal demands or excited children. Heaps of gutted speaker cabinets were piled up like empty coffins, guitars with no strings, blown-out amplifiers. In the corner, by the window, was Echo's bed. And on the bed, arranged in a sculptural contrapposto, were Nico, and Echo, fast asleep, a hypodermic at their side. Despite their narcosis there was something innocent about them. They recalled one of those seventeenth-century marmoreal effigies of dead infants embracing … skin an alabaster white, heads thrown back in a lifeless surrender to the Eternal.

‘That's me off.' Toby fixed the brim of his cap, buttoned up his jacket and was out the back door. I followed him.

Demetrius was in a parenthesis of bliss, sitting in his car, listening to country and western and chewing on a Big Mac.

Toby tapped on the window:

‘It's not'appenin', mate … Scagged up.'

Dr Demetrius kept an office on the top floor of a crumbling but dignified Victorian block on Newton Street, near Piccadilly, in the centre of Manchester. Brooding nineteenth-century warehouses, empty then, at times of use to the Jewish and Asian wholesale garment trade.

A pickled old Irish misanthrope ran the lift:

‘Woy don't yer fockin'
walk
up, y'idle swines?'

Toby and I stood there, speechless.

Demetrius butted in: ‘Good afternoon, Tommy, top floor, toute suite, last one up is a Proddy dog.'

Old Tommy wheezed whiskey-stained threats under his breath as he cranked down the ancient brass handle. ‘Headen … Godless, idle headen.'

As we stepped out he coughed up a crescendo of bronchitic malevolence. ‘Fock-ock-ockin' Fairies … should be strangulated at birth.' The lift door slammed and he descended back to his cubbyhole in hell, waiting for someone else to hate.

‘Do step this way, gentlemen.' Demetrius ushered us into the nerve centre of his entertainment empire. He lifted a stack of invitations to Dr Demetrius's
creditors meeting and annual ball
off one chair and brushed a cat off another.

‘Take a pew.'

I sat down and looked around.

Paperwork was strewn everywhere, heaps of unopened bills in the In tray. On the wall above his desk hung a photo of Carl Gustav Jung and another of Will Hay, the comedian, in his phony headmaster rig.

Dr Demetrius spoke with a pronounced Manchester accent which he tried to submerge beneath a curious telephone voice when feeling formal or trying to impress, which was most of the time. Sometimes, if there was a lull in the conversation, he would take the opportunity to recite some of his poetry in the telephone voice. People would quickly find something to say.

‘I often feel that the motorway is the modern river – “On tides of tarmac/we travel our trends.”' (He self-quoted.)

Toby cut into the versifying, ‘'Ow does it look, Doc? Yer can tell us straight, like.'

‘Now, what we have here,' Demetrius began, ‘is essentially a conflict of interests, compounded by a multiplicity of needs … Nico needs to work in order to buy heroin, and heroin in order to work; Echo needs Nico to buy heroin in order not to work; we, on the other hand, have but one simple need: Adventure.'

He pulled a Vick inhaler from his waistcoat pocket and took a deep sniff.

‘Aaaah … Yes, gentlemen, Adventure. After all, is that not why we are gathered here now? There are other rewards in life, to be sure, but they are brittle and transient. Adventure sustains the Spirit, feeds the Will, makes us rise above our miserable subjectivity … unlike our friend Echo, who prefers to wallow in his. A victim of unquestioning dogma, Echo crucifies himself for imagined sins.' He poked a Trust House Forte biro at Toby. ‘Are we to stand motionless at the foot of the cross, in some bizarre Pietà of indecision?'

‘Don't ask me, squire, I jus' want me cab fare back ter Wythenshawe.'

‘May I suggest, Toby, that you set your sights a little higher than the windswept council estates of south Manchester? A golden egg of opportunity has been placed in our fragile nest. Let us endeavour to incubate it with our support, so that it may hatch into full plumage.'

‘I'm not sure I catch yer drift,' said Toby.

Demetrius sighed, scratched his beard, and shook a couple of Valium from a small brown bottle (his father owned a chain of chemists). ‘Quite simply. Keep Echo off the stuff, and keep Nico on her feet … I'm relying on you both. I've already redirected the career aspirations of that degenerate little freeloader with the septic leg who lived on her floor. “Artistic Adviser” indeed. An unfortunate attachment – though I suppose abscess makes the heart grow fonder.' He chuckled to himself and necked the valium. ‘It's up to us now to take care of her. Remember, this is “Nico”, “Chanteuse of the Velvet Underground”. Buy yourselves some dark sunglasses and a couple of black polonecks … we'll need the art crowd behind us if we intend to make a go of this.'

He handed us three £10 notes each. Toby immediately went out and bought half a gram of heroin.

The days zigzagged into an endlessly frustrating stop/start come/go nowhere affair. Cabs from Demetrius's office over to Echo's and back again. Mysterious journeys down dark country lanes in the Saddleworth Moors, looking for Nico's heroin connection; or through the windtunnels and concrete labyrinths of the Hulme and Moss Side estates where the ice-cream men sold amphetamine before smack became more profitable. Suffer little children.

Nico-Watching: scanning her features for vestiges of that flawless beauty that I'd only ever glimpsed in a dim bedroom hopelessness, tuning into a voice that had only ever accompanied the late-night confessional elegy for a lost virginity.

In photographs the light seemed to carve and recreate her, like living sculpture, slicing into those granite cheekbones, chiselling the profile. Close up it was a different picture. The long blonde hair of the Chelsea Girl was now a greying brown, her facial skin puffed and slack, her hands and arms scabbed and scarred by needletracks, and her eyes like a broken mirror. It wasn't necessarily the years that had been unkind to her – she was only forty-two – but the woman herself. She had simply traded in her previous glamorous image for something altogether more unappealing. Yet she didn't seem to care, insulated from self-appraisal by the warm, nullifying reassurance that heroin provides. She'd locked herself in so deep that she hadn't surveyed the exterior in a while.

I couldn't work out how to talk to her. She spoke her own language … dreamy, cryptic. It was pointless trying to engage her with anodyne topics like current events or even music. But then, I was beginning to learn that musicians don't talk much. It's not that they're enigmatic or interesting. They just have nothing to say.

I didn't know if she was particularly unhappy, just strangely absent. Occasionally she'd throw out a casual remark like, ‘I haven't had a bath in a year, you know.' What was I supposed to say? From day one she remarked on a certain fastidiousness.

‘You're like a girl,' she'd say, ‘always preening.'

My academic preoccupations amused her as well.

‘How's life in Ox-foord?' she kept on asking, knowing perfectly well that ‘life' and ‘Oxfoord' viewed each other with mutual distaste. ‘Such a pretty town …' and then she'd laugh. ‘Pretty' meaning exactly that to her: ornamental and useless. Girls were ‘pretty' … and a nuisance; she made it clear they would not be a welcome addition to our company with their ‘squeaky little voices' and ‘teeedious love lives'. Then her mouth would take on a sneer and she'd lapse once more into silence, her thoughts pursuing themselves in a tumbling morphine rush …

‘Ah, poor Nico,' said Demetrius. ‘Down what dark and empty avenues must the nightingale fly?'

After a week of near-total inertia, broken only by the sporadic tuning of guitars, I began to realise that a future with Nico was in fact an invitation to the land where time stood still and where lost causes returned to inert promise. I knew the territory. It was just like a library.

Demetrius had pulled us all together from different corners of his life, expecting some sort of golden alchemical reaction. But we remained a bunch of base metal misfits, hitching up our rusty wagon to Nico's celebrity in the hope that it might take us somewhere, anywhere. As her ‘manager' he tried to keep a grip on things, but his authority was undermined by his appearance. Fatter than a cream cheese bagel, undersize trilby perched precariously on his bald head, he lumbered around Echo's place, crushing the children's toys, tripping over lead-wires, Caliban in a Burton suit.

Even when we got down to some serious attempt at a rehearsal, it was hopeless. No one knew what to do. It didn't matter how clever or proficient you might be (in fact, in Rock terms these are negative qualities), you couldn't fake the stuff. Either you felt it or you didn't.

A group of musicians have to find some purpose that unites them, apart from money. Pop groups are only gangs of preadults huddling together, finding a mutual coherence or security in the same two-chord language. Once they start to become individuals, curious and critical, then the thing falls apart and they grow up. It's a way of prolonging adolescence. We were all grownups except for Toby, and Nico wasn't really a team player.

Nico had ideas in her head but she couldn't communicate them, at least not precisely enough to convince everyone. But she knew when it worked and when it didn't, and the frustration was starting to get to her.

‘No. No. Don't play it like that,' she would say to me. ‘Play it more repetitiously … the same thing over and over.'

She was right. But I couldn't do it. I'd always want to embellish. The secret was that every time you picked up an instrument it had to be like the first time. No amount of fancy gadgetry or effects could simulate directness and intensity. Trouble was I knew my scales.

Toby would ‘Clack Clack Clack' the drumsticks, to lead us into a song, but the response would be ragged and indifferent, a splutter of notes, instead of one affirmative chord.

There was no way out except ‘out'. So I stayed at the piano and played:

over … and over … again.

‘That's nice,' said Nico.

Echo and I joined Demetrius at the Isola Bar.

‘Fame is an exacting science,' he remarked, over a full English breakfast, ‘and the famous are continually being tested.' He held up a tomato-shaped ketchup dispenser. ‘To arrive at a three-dimensional image of oneself that can be engraved upon the contemporary consciousness, one has to
eradicate that bitter-sweet fourth dimension of doubt.' He squirted a bright red blob on to his fried eggs. ‘Doubt equals Irony equals Collapse equals Failure … Pass the sugar.' Distractedly stirring his mug of tea, he continued, ‘Fame, James, projects a gigantic shadow of loneliness upon the world. Yet to want to be alone is as impertinent a wish as it would be for most of us to desire instant celebrity.' He sipped from his mug with a delicately-crooked pinkie. ‘Famous people do not have private lives and they are never alone …'

‘ … even when they're dyin' from an overdose,' added Echo.

Nico's life seemed to be refined down to interviews which, in turn, were further distillations of a constant dialogue she enacted with herself.

A man and a woman sit silently in the control room of a radio station. He's young, about twenty-five, fresh-faced, fair hair, pastel-framed glasses, baggy sweatshirt. She's of a certain age, long brown hair turning grey, dressed in a morning coat and a black leather wristband with silver skulls. There's a record on the turntable, ‘Femme Fatale'; the song's about to end.