The Singer (2 page)

Belt buckle of a Colt .45.

All the while, that voodoo beat pounding, that guitar shrieking.

The singer thrashes his way out of the bouncers’ grasp, teeters on the edge of the stage. He pushes his hair, now standing up like porcupine quills, out
of his pale saucer eyes, stares into the writhing throng of his flock as if stupefied. Their hungry hands try to catch him again, but this time he is too quick for them, leaping sideways, almost colliding with the guitarist, who leans backwards against him, his white Custom Les Paul at crotch level, pumping away at those mangled notes as if he’s fucking some girl against an alley wall.

Punk rocker
making the wanker sign, shit-eating grin on his face.

The singer raises the mic to his lips: ‘
I am the fucking king/The wretched king/Of all this shit/Of all nothing
!’ he screams. The congregation scream back their approval.

He glances over at the guitarist for a second. An almost imperceptible nod. Then he runs to the front of the stage, leaps back into the crowd, who open up and swallow him
in a grateful frenzy.

The scene dissolves into a studio shot, one of those chirpy tosser presenters that were everywhere in the early eighties, paisley shirt with the top button done up, waistband of his jeans practically under his armpits, mullet hairdo with blond tips.

He opens his mouth to say something and dissolves into static.

Gavin gets up laughing, turns the video recorder off.

‘That
was all they did!’ he whoops, still in disbelief, twenty years later. ‘That one song. That was the whole gig. It was a riot. They had a record number of complaints for putting that on the TV too.’

‘That,’ I tell him, still staring at the blank screen in astonishment, ‘was fucking amazing. Why the fuck wasn’t I around then?’ I add to myself.

‘Ahh, you young ’uns,’ Gavin sits back in his armchair,
cracks open another can of lager. ‘You missed out. Those days were the shit.’

Gavin Granger is fifteen years older than me but he’s still whippet-thin, still wears a crumpled lounge suit with bonhomie, knows he’s still good-looking enough not to care about the salt-and-pepper streaks in his shaggy hair. Maybe it’s because he’s Australian. Brought up on sunshine and cold beer and shrimps on the
barbie – not roast dinners and cold winters and Surrey motherly love.

Whereas I, Eddie Bracknell, am twenty-nine and already running to flab, already starting to lose my hair, already in a permanent state of anxiety. As a result of all those things and probably more.

But at this moment I don’t give a shit. At this moment, my
palms are sticky with elation, sliding down the side of my tin of Red
Stripe, which has crumpled and turned warm in my grasp.

There are so many questions I want to ask him.

‘What happened, then?’ I start with the obvious one.

‘To him – to the singer?’

Gavin lifts his eyes and then his can to the ceiling.

‘A chick happened, mate,’ he finally says. ‘Isn’t it always the fucking way…’

May 1977

Stevie Mullin was already halfway through his second jam doughnut, on top of the new school sports centre, when he realised what all the shouting was about.

He liked it up there, on top of the world. Ever since he’d found a way how – a tree, a rope, the top of the boys’ changing rooms – he’d been spending the best part of his lunchtimes high above the playground.
As Stevie spent more time twagging than actually in lessons, no one missed him much. To be frank, most of his peers were actually relieved by his absence. It made him laugh that no one had ever so much as looked up and noticed him.

It was a good place for a smoke and a raid on the day’s takings from the school canteen, or cornershop, whichever was most vulnerable to his wandering hands that day.
But the thing he liked about it most was that you could see the big cranes of the docks from up here.

Stevie’s Grandad Cooper worked on Hull docks, and he was Stevie’s favourite relative. A rubble-faced Yorkshireman, as short as he was broad, with fair hair that stood up like Stan Laurel’s, a
permanent roll-up hanging from the corner of his mouth and a permanent ‘bastard’ on his lips. He’d taken
Stevie up one of those cranes once, when he was seven.

‘Don’t worry, son, I’m right behind you,’ he’d said, as the wind whipped through Stevie’s hair and his little hands gripped the freezing iron rail tightly. ‘Steady as a goat.’

But Stevie hadn’t been frightened, he’d been exhilarated. He could see everything from here – the mouth of the Humber curving grey out to the North Sea, the city stretched
out beneath him like it was nothing but a toy town, and away to the north, the outline of the distant moors. It instilled in him an urgent desire to be places he wasn’t supposed to be, to see things other people didn’t see.

Eight years later he could still feel that weird yearning in his stomach that he’d felt on that day, still kept it close. But Stevie wasn’t dreaming about the dockyards as
he crammed the sticky stolen bounty into his mouth that day. Instead his head was playing over and over The Sex Pistols’ ‘God Save the Queen’, a single that had been on his turntable incessantly since he’d liberated it from Sidney Scarborough’s record shop at the weekend.

He just loved the way Johnny Rotten said: ‘
We mean it, maaaaaannnn
,’ like one drawn-out sneer.

He also loved the way Steve
Jones played guitar, was glad that his name was Steve too, because Mullin also harboured a dream of playing in a band. He knew the guitar he had to have – a white Custom Les Paul. At the moment all he had was a thing called a Holner which cost £40 from Band Box second-hand music shop and was supposed to kid you into thinking it was a Hofner. It sounded crap and it hurt his fingers trying to keep
the notes down, but he had begun to riddle out how to get those chords, if not the monster sound that Jones achieved.

He was lost in his reverie for some time, picturing the fretboard and how his fingers had to fit there, until gradually his subconscious drifted and harsh noises filtered through the veil.

‘Fuckin’ nignog,’ rang out clearly from below.

‘It’s Chalkie,’ came another, a bad impersonation
of Jim Davidson’s bad impersonation of a West Indian accent, ‘Chalkie White!’

‘How you doin’ den, Chalkie?’ Another comedian. ‘You want some ban-an-na?’

Stevie was on his feet and over to the side of the sports hall.

A group of his classmates had cornered the new boy by the side of the boys’ changing rooms where any patrolling teachers would be hard-pressed to see.

There were five of them
– the hard men of the fifth year. Gary Dunton, stocky, red-haired, trying hard to grow his first sidies and bumfluff moustache was the ringleader and chief Davidson impersonator. Then there were Malc and Martin Carver, twin bruisers with Kevin Keegan perms and thick eyebrows that formed single lines across their Neanderthal foreheads. Hull Kingston Rovers scarves and donkey jackets buttoned up despite
the warmness of the day, going ‘Hur hur hur,’ like two cast-offs from
Planet of the Apes
. Skinhead Barney Lee, Dunton’s second-in-command, Rovers scarf as well and a Leeds Utd thumbs-up patch sewn on his demin jacket, waving a banana and pretending to scratch under his armpits. Lagging back from the others, shortarse speccy Kevin Holme, their lackey, keeping a lookout for teacher.

Their prey
was pressed up against the bricks of the changing room wall, breathing heavily. From his head burst a fuzzy mass of black candyfloss, a thug beacon that would stand out a mile anywhere in Hull, especially in the place he’d been consigned to for his education. His black skin gleamed like crude oil in the sun, shockingly dark and exotic against the acne-riddled, raspberry-and-cream complexions of his
tormentors. Beads of sweat broken out on his forehead, eyes a mixture of fear and rage.

Lynton Powell was too tall for his school uniform, but not yet broad enough to fill it out. He was taller than any of the others, in
fact, but so skinny and slight they wouldn’t look upon that as an advantage.

Dunton took a swipe at him, trying to grab his bag from off his shoulder. Lynton jumped sideways
like a cat, bag falling onto the concrete, his other arm coiling round into a fist, every inch of him shaking.

‘Get off me,’ he hissed, barely audibly.

‘Ooo! Ooo! Ooo!’ Lee and the Brothers Grim started making their monkey noises, bouncing up and down like they were baboons. Speccy Kev giggled nervously behind his hand.

‘All right, you bastards!’ shouted Stevie.

The hard men stopped their
ape japing and looked around, bewildered, in every direction but up.

He actually heard Dunton go: ‘Durrr?’

‘Up here, you fuckin’ divs.’

Five lumpy porridge faces cracked round in his direction, wet red mouths going slack when they realised from where and to whom they were speaking. Signs of astonishment betrayed.

Dunton was the first to regain his composure. ‘Paddy,’ he sneered. ‘The fuck
you doin’ up there, you spaz?’

You had to hand it to him. Only the most vicious ginger cunt in the playground could rise to the top by being the first and most aggressive to racially slur everyone else.

Stevie – whose accent was every bit as East Yorkshire as Dunton’s – broke into a broad grin.

‘You’re a funny bastard, aren’t you, Dunton? Real comedian. That were a good show you were puttin’
on there.’

They couldn’t tell if he was joking or not, and in the seconds it took for them to eye each other, then him, then each other, Lynton took the opportunity to scoop up his schoolbag and race back towards the safety of the school.

‘Somethin’ wrong with you, Spudhead?’ Dunton had decided he was being mocked, although he still wasn’t quite sure how or why. Lynton forgotten, he squinted
his piggy eyes, affected what
he thought was a Brian Jacks judo stance in Stevie’s direction. The others moved in closer, formed a circle around their leader.

Stevie belched loudly, taste of jam and sugar in his mouth. ‘Nowt much,’ he continued to smile. ‘Part from this.’

Dunton, the brothers and Barney watched transfixed as Stevie Mullin casually unzipped his trousers and pulled out the most
enormous cock any of them had ever seen.

Stevie winked and affected his Dad’s Belfast accent. ‘It’s the luck of the Irish.’

Their mouths were still wide open as the first splashes of hot piss hit Dunton’s lips. Only then did they all recoil screaming: ‘Ugghhh, Jesus! You dirty fuckin’ paddy bastid! You fuckin’ homo queer! What the fuck are you doin’?’

Stevie’s whole body shook with laughter
as he rolled his weapon round in an arc, catching all five of them with his deadly fire. He was still literally pissing himself when a sharp teacher’s voice demanded: ‘You boys! What’s going on out here!’

And he couldn’t get it back in his pants quick enough to avoid the accusing fingers that shot up in his direction, the hard man voices now turned to whining, spragging victims: ‘It’s Mullin,
sir, he’s on the roof and he’s pissing on us!’

‘Language!’ stormed Mr Smith, aka Herr Schmitler, the German master and worst of all possible teachers to be caught by.

‘Boy Mullin, what are you doing on that roof? Get down here immediately!’

In his rush to hide his modesty, Stevie almost fell over backwards.

‘And you boys,’ he turned his attentions back to the others, ‘what do you think you’re
doing here? You know this area is out of bounds at break-time. What are you playing at, eh? Eh?’

Stevie almost got expelled that time.

The cane, detention, his parents up the school to talk about his future; all that shit. It was all worth it for the expression on Dunton’s thick face, which would continue to keep Stevie happy
for years to come. It gave him further pleasure that while his own
reputation as a mad fucker not to be messed with was increased, Dunton’s became tainted by Chinese whispers that suggested he was some kind of sex pervert who liked drinking men’s piss.

Stevie didn’t waste a moment of his month of detentions. While his right hand robotically wrote out
I WILL SHOW RESPECT FOR SCHOOL PROPERTY AND SCHOOL RULES
1,000 times, his head neared completion on the notes
for the Steve Jones riff. The left hand holding the paper down was at the same time forming chord structures with its fingers.

From the classroom where he spent his penury he was able to make a further interesting discovery.

A music group met after school every Thursday. He watched them going in and out of the school hall.

One of them was speccy Kevin Holme. He was always carting the most kit
into the hall, which meant he had to be a drummer. Away from his gang, he had a secret life.

And finally, one Friday, as Stevie strolled out of the gates of the now deserted school at five o’clock, someone was waiting for him.

Hanging nervously around the gates, left hand absently rubbing right bicep, eyes darting up and down the street, pegleg trousers halfway up his shins, blazer sleeves halfway
to his elbows.

‘Ey up, Lynton,’ Stevie was surprised. ‘Waiting for summat?’

Lynton glared up at him then back down at the ground. He took in bandy legs and drainpipe trousers, yellow socks and brothel creepers, white shirt and bootlace black tie, blazer slung over one shoulder. School uniform like no one else wore it.

Lynton’s eyes both fierce and fearful. ‘I wanted to say thank you.’ His voice
came out as barely a whisper, a southern accent with a bass rumble. Then his head came up again, eyes more fierce, volume turned up. ‘What you do it for, man? Why d’you help me out?’

Stevie shrugged. ‘Dunton’s a cunt,’ he said simply, liking the way the two words almost rhymed.

Lynton liked it too. Couldn’t suppress a surprisingly high-pitched giggle.

‘Dunton, Cunton, the fuck’s the difference?
Reckon us paddies and nignogs should stick together against the likes of him.’

Lynton stopped laughing for a minute, frown forming across his brow at the word ‘nignog’. He did look quite frightening when he scowled. Then he smiled again, a wide, brilliant smile that lit his whole face up.