Stories We Could Tell (31 page)

‘Come on,’ she said, getting out of the car. She took his hand and they walked down to the boathouse, the grass still slick and glistening with the apocalyptic rains that came down the night Elvis died.

It was far too early to hire a boat, but they agreed that nobody would mind very much if they just borrowed one for a while. Giggling now, their shoes sopping wet from the grass, and afraid
of falling into the lake, Ray stumbled to the sharp end of the boat – the bow, she insisted on calling it – while she settled herself facing him, slipping the oars into their worn metal rings.

They pushed off, gliding over the still glassy water, and she began to row with a slow, lazy motion. She was good. He had to admit it. Far better than he would have been. They smiled at each other, and didn’t feel the need to talk. A few black swans followed them until it was clear that they were not going to provide breakfast, and then they peeled away and squawked back to the shore, their wings tucked up beneath them.

The sun was already dazzling and in the distance Ray could hear the muffled roar of the traffic on the Bayswater Road and Park Lane, heralding the day to come. But Hyde Park still seemed to be sleeping, and it was a thousand shades of green.

When they were in the middle of the lake she pulled in the oars and let the boat drift. Ray trailed his hands in the water as the boat lazily traced a half-circle, at first pointing south towards the Albert Memorial, then drifting round to aim at the statue of Peter Pan on the west bank.

Ray watched her tugging at the gold ring on the third finger of her left hand, frowning with the effort for a few seconds, unable to get it off, and then pulling it over her knuckle and free.

She held the ring between the thumb and index finger of her right hand, regarding it thoughtfully, as if she couldn’t quite work out how it had ever got there. Then she threw it into the air as far as she possibly could.

The ring hit the water with a soft splash that made the black swans stir for a moment, anticipating breakfast again, flapping their wings towards the boat, and then turning away when they realised that it was nothing.

As Leon took the lift up to the twenty-first floor, he worked on his review.

Leni and the Riefenstahls. A dumb name for a dumb band. Leon didn’t regret missing their gig. He was glad he had missed it. Nothing would ever be better than meeting Ruby and dancing to ‘Shame’ with Ruby and having sex with Ruby in a sleeping bag. Nothing would ever be better than the night he had just had, the first night of his life when he felt like he had escaped the confines of his own skin.

Leon entered the office, dawn streaming through the windows now, and noticed a light on in the review room. Skip Jones was in there, surrounded by upright cigarette butts and records.

‘You got any smokes?’ Skip said, looking somewhere over Leon’s shoulder.

Leon fumbled in the pocket of his Lewis Leather, always a little nervous in the presence of Skip, and pulled out a crumpled pack. There were still a few in there. Leon realised with a twinge of pride that he hadn’t had much chance to smoke.

‘Wild,’ Skip said, glancing at the pack and then briefly at Leon’s face. Leon offered him the pack, but there was something wrong with Skip’s hands. They were shaking so badly that Skip dropped the cigarette he pulled out, and he had to hold his hands as if to stop the trembling as Leon picked up the cigarette from the stained and pock-marked carpet. They both pretended that nothing had happened.

‘You review somebody last night?’ Skip said.

Leon lit two cigarettes, took a long drag from both and passed one to Skip. ‘I was meant to review the Riefenstahls,’ Leon said. ‘But, to tell you the truth, I got a bit sidetracked.’

Skip studied the tip of the Marlboro. His hands were still shaking, but holding the cigarette seemed to calm them. ‘What kind of sidetrack?’

‘I met a girl,’ Leon said. ‘I met this great girl. This unbelievable girl.’

Skip smiled shyly. ‘Well, I missed gigs for worse reasons than
that. Don’t worry about it. The older guys are going to have their hands full with Elvis. They won’t miss your review.’

‘Oh, I think I’m going to write it up anyway,’ Leon said, grinning. ‘But don’t tell anyone.’

Skip looked concerned. ‘Wild,’ he said, sounding worried.

‘It’ll be all right,’ Leon said reassuringly, more to himself than Skip. ‘I’ve seen Leni and the Riefenstahls plenty of times, and they were always rubbish. What’s the point in us writing about a band like that anyway? Bunch of posers. They’re not going to change the world, are they?’

Leon spoke with his usual total certainty, but inside he was confused. He thought about Ruby and Evelyn ‘Champagne’ King and how he had felt when he had worked up the courage to dance. Being at Lewisham last Saturday seemed to show him the road he had to take – fighting Fascism, being committed, awakening the masses. But last night suggested that the masses were already more awake than he would ever be.

‘Skip, do you think that people can love black music and still be racist?’

Skip Jones shrugged. ‘I don’t know, man. Unfortunately, yeah, I guess so – people can love black music and hate black people – but maybe not if they listen to enough of it.’ Skip carefully placed what remained of the cigarette on its filter tip with all the rest. ‘Hey, you’re right to make a stand. If you don’t care at – what are you now? Twenty? – then you never will. And it’s good to get these bits and pieces into
The Paper
. Fuck, man, Nazis are a complete bummer.’

Leon thought of the faces contorted by hate at Lewisham. The total, all-consuming loathing on the other side. The jeering
sieg heils
and Nazi salutes. Which one of them was her father?

‘But they are never going to be more than bits and pieces,’ Skip said. ‘If this was the
Daily Worker
then no dude would buy it, no dude would advertise in it, and you, dude, would be selling it on
a street corner and outside factory gates. And frankly, the number of dudes buying would be few.’ He rubbed his eyes, dragged fingers through his oily Keith Richards hair.
‘The music isn’t there to save the world,’
Skip told Leon, and the words struck him like a bolt of lightning.
‘It’s there to save your life.’

Skip smiled, looking exhausted now, but the trembling in his hands was subsiding. Leon realised that he should start writing soon if he wanted to finish before they all began arriving at the office. But he loved talking to Skip. Even though he still felt confused about what he should expect from music, and what the world should expect from him, somehow it made him feel better.

But the morning was coming fast now, so Leon said see you later to Skip, went to his desk, threaded an A4 sheet of paper into the red plastic Valentine typewriter and stared at the empty page. And then he thought.

There were many things that annoyed him about Leni and the Riefenstahls – their toying with Fascist symbols, their po-faced stage demeanour, their clumping three-chord songs dressed up as something profound. But it was their patronising smugness that really infuriated him. If you knew that Leni Riefenstahl was the director of
Triumph of the Will
, that chilling celebration of Nazi Germany on parade, then you could be in their gang. And if the reference flew over your head, then you couldn’t. Leon began to type.

Ever heard
of Triumph of the Will,
dear reader? When Leni and the Riefenstahls played the Red Cow on a wet Tuesday night, it was triumph of the wankers
.

Not brilliant, but pleasantly abusive. The sun was coming up strong now, streaming through the Venetian blinds and smoked glass, making him squint, and his mind and body were suddenly aware that they had been up all night. Leon numbed himself with scalding vending-machine black coffee and didn’t stop pounding the typewriter until he had a 500-word hatchet job. Then he rose
from his desk, stretched his aching limbs, and deposited the review on Kevin White’s desk.

On his way to the lifts, he glanced through the window of the review room. Skip was resting his head on the table, his face turned away from the door, surrounded by old cigarette butts and new vinyl.

He appeared to be sleeping, so Leon didn’t say goodbye.

Ray left the park and started walking east down Oxford Street, the sun directly ahead of him, hurting his eyes, coming up over the miserable concrete slab of Centre Point. The night’s broken glass crunched beneath his feet like ice.

The day was coming on but the armies of the night were still abroad – stragglers reeling home from the night before and bleary-eyed workers returning from the graveyard shift, all sharing the rubbish-strewn streets with the first of the day’s commuters.

Ray increased his pace, wanting the chance to clear his desk at
The Paper
before the working day began. The fact that he had not found John Lennon got all mixed up with the woman he had met who could not leave her husband. His heart felt like it had been kicked down the street, but he wasn’t sure what had kicked it the hardest. If only he could have been with her. If only he could have tracked down John. If only he could have done one thing right.

It was too late now. The night was dead and gone and there was nothing left to do but grab the few souvenirs he had collected from the last three years – an Emmylou Harris promo T-shirt, a C-90 cassette of his interview with Jackson Browne, an 8×10 photo Misty had taken of Ray smiling shyly next to James Taylor – and get out before there was any need for goodbyes. That was the thing that would really break his heart. Having to say goodbye to Terry, and Leon, and the old life. No goodbyes, he thought. Just go.

The sun was temporarily lost behind the department stores of Oxford Street and suddenly he could see clearly. Ahead of him a
larky pack of shaven-headed lads shoved and jostled each other. They were dressed in the latest revival style – number one crops, Ben Sherman shirts, thin white braces, white Sta-Press trousers and highly polished DM boots. You were starting to see them all over the city – the new skinheads, who were never going to deck themselves out in Vivienne Westwood T-shirts and bondage trousers. Ray swerved towards the road, planning to give them a wide berth.

He saw that there was an Asian kid with glasses and a plastic Adidas kitbag walking towards them. There were a few jocular greetings, and someone chanting,
‘Oh, Doctor, I’m in trouble – well, goodness gracious me!’
and then suddenly they had the Asian kid’s bag in their hands and they were tossing it between them, the kid playing piggy in the middle as they easily held him at bay. On their fingers gold signet rings flashed with the sunlight.

The bag must have been open because the next thing Ray knew the filthy pavement was covered with the kid’s pitiful belongings. Some foil-wrapped sandwiches, a thermos flask, a book called
Computer Programming for Beginners
. The kid was on his hands and knees, retrieving his stuff, as the skins – tiring of their game now – tossed his kitbag into the middle of the road, and began kicking around the foil-wrapped sandwiches.

‘They think it’s all over,’ one of them shouted, booting the sandwiches so hard that the foil split open and shreds of white bread and cheddar cheese and tomato flew everywhere. ‘It is now!’

They were still good humoured, pretending to be football commentators or Peter Sellers, and their mood only changed when Ray passed to one side of them and just couldn’t keep his mouth shut. He picked up
Computer Programming for Beginners
, the sole of a size-ten boot imprinted on the cover, and gave it to the kid. Those happy skins – they were everything he loathed.

‘Why don’t you leave him alone?’ he said.

They were immediately on him. Fists flying, boots lashing out,
so engorged with rage that the wild blows seemed to skim off his head and legs or miss him completely, and it didn’t even hurt very much at first. Then one of them had him in some kind of headlock, and Ray could smell the sweat and Hai Karate aftershave, and he caught a glimpse of the Asian kid retrieving his kitbag just before a big red number 73 bus crushed it under its wheels.

Then the Asian kid was running away and Ray was flat on his back, the toes of the boots catching him in his ribs and head, not missing now, hurting him now, and he was curling up on the pavement, covering his eyes and his balls, gasping at the stabs of pain. Then, as abruptly as it began, they were backing off.

When Ray looked up he saw Terry lash out with the side of his foot and drive it deep into a midriff that was adorned in Ben Sherman blue-and-white gingham. There were three skinheads around him and Terry smacked one in the face with a right hander and, as his momentum spun him around, kicked another up the arse of his Sta-Press. Then they were running, shouting that Terry had better keep looking over his shoulder, telling him that their brothers would kill him, and Ray saw that they were just weaselly little nothings, all swagger and spite and sixteen at the outside, lousy rotten bullies who folded as soon as someone hit them back.

Still, he was impressed, and shook his head with wonder as Terry pulled him to his feet.

‘Who the fucking hell taught you
-V
Ray began.

The words died in his throat because Terry had struck the pose of his hero – a boxer’s stance, wide legged and left side on, but with the hands relaxed not clenched, watching the pack of skinheads go out of the very corner of his eyes while moving his head from side to side – slowly, snake-like, as though he had a mild nervous disorder – and Ray knew the answer to his question before it had even left his mouth.

Bruce Lee.

Bruce Lee taught Terry how to do that.

Terry had the Ford Capri with him.

He was a poor driver, hanging on to the steering wheel as if it was a life belt, constantly drifting either too close to the centre of the road and making other drivers hoot with alarm, or so near to the kerb that the Capri’s wheels sometimes hit concrete with a screech of rubber and metal.

But Ray was so exhausted by now that he dozed in the passenger seat, a new song on the breakfast show coming out of the radio. ‘Dancing Queen’ by Abba, the Hairy Cornflake said, and it was full of yearning and youthful nostalgia, as if it was about this kid who was already missing some lost golden age.
Having the time of your life – oooh, oooh
. Terry went over a bump in the road and Ray was jolted awake. He expected to see the bleak towers of the South Bank. But they were somewhere in the backstreets of the West End, just north of Marble Arch, where the Arab cafés and restaurants seemed to go on for miles.