One Three One: A Time-Shifting Gnostic Hooligan Road Novel (8 page)

Lying prone upon my too short single bed, naked except for my EasyAir eye-mask, I hovered in a warm psychic bath somewhere between sleep and lucid dreaming. Having spent the whole night steeping myself once more in those infamous ‘events of sixteen years ago’, those darkest hours which I so rarely addressed nowadays, it suddenly occurred to me that four women in similar circumstances to ourselves might well after-the-event have discussed their shared nightmare somewhat more than we. But, in truth, that romantic notion took no account of Brent’s instant suicide, nor did it address the delicate family balance that had existed in the relationship between Mick, his sister Sharon, his mother Gabriella and the twins.

Nevertheless, as these obscure reasoning systems of my 6am mind signalled to their host that it was time to shut down for the night, I registered that this first of my final days had been lived at far too accelerated a pace. Poor Anna! But having at last forced open the airlock between myself and those so wilfully long forgotten ‘events of sixteen years ago’, I was – as I more and more re-evaluated our Clan of ’89 – fascinated rather than offended at the speed with which Mick Goodby had, just that Rave Spring, graduated from Liverpool F.C. pub rhymer with a single power-rant under his belt to full-on People’s Poet with a canon that could have challenged John Cooper Clarke, Ed Banger and John the Postman all three, albeit still mostly
delivered with R.A.F. brat Goodby’s terminally unsatisfying drifting dialect. Where you from now? But as Mick’s sole claim to fame had until that time lain only in the bellowed Half Biscuit manner of his pub oratory – literally screaming to be heard – it is here essential to emphasise that Mick’s remarkable transformation that Spring of ’89 was in no way an Anfield-o-centric Vision brought on by his legions of Liverpool ‘Last Tango in Paris’ pub admirers. For fans he had virtually none, the mass merely tolerators and the clueless.

No, dreary me, no. Instead, the making of the M. Goodby as we know him – ‘What, the Jungian Chance Dancer with the Teen Dervishes?’ Yeah man, that Mick Goodby – was the result of one intensely homosocial (as in ‘womenless’) Rave Fortnight spent in the Peak District watching me DJ at Arthur Tadgell’s Dehydrated, followed by several inspirational weeks of hanging around in a mental café with two gorgeous ladies, several pencilled-up scruffs AKA wannabe rappers, and one extremely posh bloke whom we’d all in time come to love madly.

It all started that rainy Tuesday morning in mid-March when Gary Have-a-laugh ran out of skins, and popped up the hill to score some Green Rizla from our local head shop Sleeping Stoner, Hidden Stash. He came back raving about a new café at the old undertaker’s between Betty Bothways’ vintage bazaar and our head shop. Smart! But Have-a-laugh, quite atypically I noted at the time, also laid so many Rizlas on our combined households – no more than 50 yards separated us all – that
none of us in the neighbourhood had need to ascend the hill. Thereafter, Stu and Gary started having breakfast out, a highly unusual event about which we were immediately suspicious. For Stu, despite his Manny lad accent, is a Scot from Aberdeen – one Charles Stuart – and hates spending money, e.g.: after an away game Little Chef, he’ll even goal-hang rich middle-aged Liverpool fans at the till, patting his pockets. So anyway for about two weeks we never saw either of those two Rave entrepreneurs, except when they laid mucho skins upon our homes. Then one night after work, Betty Bothways – the sweetest, faggiest middle-aged man – dropped some taffeta and lace round at ours for our good mate Doughy (currently out of town), and mentioned that the two new café proprietresses were buying up only the most figure-hugging dresses that passed through Betty’s shop. Dammit! Of course, the two-week absence of Messrs Stuart and Laugh was immediately explained. Hot totty hath beckoned.

The next morning, M. Goodby, Uncle Rob Dean and I took long baths, then strolled uphill for breakfast at the former undertakers, now immaculately renamed ‘The Decoffinated Café’ and actively trading upon its former occupation with dark lighting, black table cloths, black bunting, huge daytime candles and two voluptuous young café owners by the curious names of Memorial and Buriel Czywczynsky, whose undertaker parents had recently been killed in a horrific head-on collision. Both mum and dad had been of Moravian extraction, that strange Christian cult that worships the Centurion’s spear wound in Christ’s side as a surrogate vagina. Don’t ask me about it, I’m just the reporter. Those three weird guys out of the Smoke Dopes are of the same ‘religion’. Anyway, such questionable tenets as the Moravians were rustling up during the 1800s had got
all but the wealthiest kicked out of everywhere, though many Moravians had, like the Czywczynsky family, survived here and there as undertakers, mortuary surgeons and other queasy occupations. The Decoffinated Café, however, was the least queasy establishment I’d ever experienced and, opening as it did on our part of the hill, facilitated a real blossoming of talent that Spring ’89 Offensive (as Mick would come to bill it with extreme hindsight). A sparkling clean café serving superb food, and all under the management of two very gorgeous ladies, our entire gang relocated to the D-Cough, Mick’s nickname claiming the whole establishment for our new Beat Poet phase. I myself fell for Memorial’s epic funereal humour and perpetually black figure-hugging dresses and we immediately embarked on a deep and real Moravian love affair, whilst her almost equally ‘becoming’ younger sister Buriel – to rhyme with ‘Muriel’, by the way – became entangled with Rob the Dean, who sat around the D-Cough lovesick faking flamenco music on his acoustic.

These new romantic arrangements of ours having left both of the failed suitors Stuart and Have-a-laugh out in the cold, they rallied superbly and, finally – across the Gothick tables of the café – began to put flesh on their until-then-imaginary rap outfit the Kit Kat Rappers. Wonders never cease! For three full years previously, the Kit Kat Rappers had been no more than a useful invention of Stu, Gary Have-a-laugh and our agree-with-everybody mate Yeh-Yeh, their invented band name simply there to add ‘musician’ clout to their places on the guestlists of Liverpool, Manchester and the Peak District. ‘Made any records?’ doormen would ask. Er. ‘Do us a rap?’ Er. When all three walked into Dehydrated one weekend, a Solzhenitzian picture of Near Death the lot of them, all on the same bad drugs with streaming colds and all three making no attempts to locate
the Day Nurse, Mick clustered them together under some art-photo of Klaus Schulze, zipped up each into his own snorkel parka then took two sweaty polaroids. Giving them one copy between the three as reference, Goodby now got prescriptive.

None of the Kit Kat Rappers had written songs before, but now they had their metaphor. All three remembered this shit TV commercial and all three were desperate to rap. Like Morris Dancers practising on waste ground behind a car park, you’d catch them in the D-Cough Gents ‘putting it to’ themselves in the mirror. Now they got it, finally. Now they understood that the Rave Era was upon us and that hip quality rhymes could be traded for sniff, blow and suck. Or even, heaven forbid: cash! And although their Kit Kat creations weren’t really Rap at all, more of a sub-sub-Madness Cheeky Cockney barrow boy type-of-thing, that debut song ‘Second Class to Dottingham’ sealed the Kit Kat Rappers as a Triple Brotherhood.

And thereafter the D-Cough was cooking. When the lovely sisters fancied evening opening, Rob Dean painted the façade
with immaculate stripes in white and fluorescent orange that became noticeable only after dark, then put himself forward as the evening’s lone moustachioed Mariachi. Viva Zapata. And death to the Apathista! Moreover, the hill in that current incarnation showcased the perfect environment for creativity. Its park, its pubs, its perfect combination of shops – a great barber’s, greengrocer’s, quality butcher’s, an antique shop even – everything enabled us to stick around all day, every day. Until suddenly from within the nurturing bosom of our elevated scene flowed poetry a-plenty and all from the fountainhead of M. Goodby; great stashes of the stuff. A handy audience, a theatrical atmosphere, and a café with a floor large enough from which to declaim new poems whenever business was slow enough. Moreover, Mick had – in Memorial and Buriel – two lovely women who admired him enough to order into the café ‘only for Mick’ any unusual or exotic fizzy drinks that they could locate. So quite why ye Bard sought to name his debut café opus ‘Bad in Bed’, well, none of us could have hoped to guess. On hearing Mick’s performance of the aforementioned, I was somewhat relieved to discover that the contents of the poem were, though still hair-raising, considerably less sphincter-puckering than I’d anticipated:

Now of course, due to my decades of, ahem, rich cultural contacts – musicians, poets, authors, film directors, drug dealers, criminals, smugglers and the like – and the extrovert nature of Arthur Tadgell’s late-70s music scene from which I emerged, I’ve always – even during my mid-80s lowest drugged-out ebb – always always enjoyed such a fulsome and richly alternative lifestyle that letting close friends share in that lifestyle continued at all times to be among my greatest joys in life. So when I saw The Decoffinated Café scene springing up so fertile right there on our own hill, and having learned through my own recent Dance successes with those Dayglo Maradona 12″s that it’s never too late to start afresh, well, I was determined to disseminate some of this late-80s D-Cough largesse around these Loved-Up Islands. Better still, Gary Have-a-laugh and Stu shared my determination to help transform that café on-the-hill into a cultural fire-beacon. Here be greatness! Watch this place! Thus, through our myriad social connections, it wasn’t too long before the D-Cough attracted fascinated music producers, local video makers and the like, each additional guest further imbuing our scene on-the-hill with the kind of instant Clamour that could never in ten million years have been struck around Anfield way. Remember these dark days. For it was – in this Rave Era of the UK – a time of huge duplicity. Those same council estate
cunts that had, two years previously, been happily cutting down our kind in the streets were all of them suddenly claiming to be slinging their lot in with us. Hello, Anoraksia Nervosa’s ‘Baggy on the Inside’. Fuck off. Hello, The Farm’s ‘Groovy Train’. Fuck off. Your fifteen re-mixes cannot disguise the vileness of your Endgame. I didn’t want to be hugged by enlightened council-house-and-violent types with their concealed weapons. Mick the suspicious Social Worker wrote his MDMA poem ‘I’ll Love You Till It Wears Off’, and nailed their itinerant truths entirely. But I’m sure that none of us could have anticipated just how in opposition to these raggedy-arsed Know Nothings, these Salt-of-the-Earth planet squatters, would be the next great character to pass across the portals of ye D-Cough …

It all kicked off one morning when some under-caffeinated arsehole left the so-called Culture section of
The Guardian
in Goodby’s regular seat. And if that wasn’t enough to set the world off kilter, Mick spent the next hour raging at ‘the sheer White Supremacist smugness’ of an article therein that declared the Pun to be Dead! Oh, Mick was nearly suicidal about this.