that in my case, after a while, it wasn’t the drumming that mattered, it was just the drugs.
In a matter of months I progressed, if that’s the word, from chewing the inside of Benzedrine inhalers to injecting heroin into the vein. And for my education in this department I had Foxy Palmer to thank. Or blame.
I’d first met Foxy at the Bouillabaisse, a Soho drinking club frequented by mainly black US servicemen and newly resident West Indians, of whom Foxy was one. A short, stubby man with a pot belly beneath his extravagantly patterned shirts and a wisp of greying beard, his ears stuck out, fox-like, from the side of his head. A scaled-down Foxy would have made the perfect garden gnome.
‘Hey, white boy!’ he hailed me from his seat near the piano. ‘You here to play?’
‘Maybe.’
‘Forget your horn?’
For an answer, I straightened my arm and let a pair of hickory drumsticks slide down into the palm of my hand.
A bunch of musicians, mostly refugees from some dance-band gig or other, were jamming their way through ‘One O’Clock Jump’, but then a couple of younger guys arrived and Foxy pulled my arm towards him with a grin and said, ‘Here come the heebie-jeebie boys.’
In the shuffle that followed, Tony Crombie claimed his place behind the drums and after listening to him firing ‘I Got Rhythm’ at a hundred miles an hour, I slipped my sticks back out of sight.
‘So,’ Foxy said, planting himself next to me in the gents, ‘that Tony, what d’you think?’
‘I’m thinking of cutting my arms off just above the wrist.’
Foxy smiled his foxy smile. ‘You’re interested, I got somethin’ less extreme might just do the trick.’
At first I didn’t know what he meant.
*
The Bouillabaisse closed down and reopened as the Fullado. Later there was the Modernaires in Old Compton Street, owned by the gangster Jack Spot. Along with half a hundred other out-of-work musicians, I stood around on Archer Street on Monday afternoons, eager to pick up whatever scraps might come my way: depping at the Orchid Ballroom, Purley; a one-night stand with Ambrose at the Samson and Hercules in Norwich. And later, after shooting up, no longer intimidated or afraid, I’d descend the steps into the smoke of Mac’s Rehearsal Rooms where Club Eleven had its home and take my turn at sitting in.
For a time I made an effort to hide the track marks on my arms but after that I didn’t care.
Junkie — when did I first hear the word?
Applied to me, I mean.
It might have been at the Blue Posts, around the corner from the old Feldman Club, an argument with a US airman that began with a spilt pint of beer and escalated from there.
‘Goddamn junkie, why the fuck aren’t you in uniform?’
I didn’t think he wanted to hear about the trumped-up nervous condition a well-paid GP had attested to, thus ensuring my call-up would be deferred. Instead some pushing and shoving ensued, at the height of which a bottle was broken against the edge of the bar.
Blind luck enabled me to sway clear of the jagged glass as it swung towards my face; luck and sudden rage allowed me to land three punches out of four, the last dropping him to his knees before executing the coup de grace, a swiftly raised knee which caught him underneath the chin and caused him to bite off a sliver of tongue before he slumped, briefly unconscious, to the floor.
As I made my exit, I noticed the thin-faced man sitting close by the door, time enough to think I recognised him from somewhere without being able to put a finger on where that was. Then I was out into the damp November air.
‘I hear you takin’ up the fight game,’ Foxy said with glee, next time I bumped into him. And then, ‘I believe you know a friend of mine. Gordon Neville, detective sergeant.’
The thin-faced man leaned forward and held out a hand. ‘That little nonsense in the Blue Posts, I liked the way you handled yourself. Impressive.’
I nodded and left it at that.
In the cracked toilet mirror my skin looked like old wax.
‘Your pal from CID,’ I asked Foxy, ‘he okay?’
‘Gordon?’ Foxy said with a laugh. ‘Salt o’ the earth, ain’t that the truth.’
Probably not, I thought.
He was waiting for me outside, the grey of his raincoat just visible in the soft grey fog that had drifted up from the river. When I turned left he fell into step alongside me, two men taking an evening stroll. Innocent enough.
‘A proposition,’ Neville said.
I shook my head.
‘Hear me out, at least.’
‘Sorry, not interested.’
His hand tugged at my sleeve. ‘You’re carrying, right?’
‘Wrong,’ I lied.
‘You just seen Foxy, you’re carrying. No question.’
‘So?’ The H burning a hole in my inside pocket.
‘So you don’t want me to search you, haul you in for possession.’
Our voices were muffled by the fog. If Neville knew about Foxy but was allowing him to deal, Foxy had to be paying him off. If what he wanted from me was more backhanders he had another think coming.
‘What do you want?’ I asked.
A woman emerged from a doorway just ahead of us, took one look at Neville and ducked back in.
‘Information,’ Neville said.
At the corner he stopped. The fog was thicker here and I could barely see the far side of the street.
‘What kind of information?’
‘Musicians. In the clubs. The ones you hang around with. Of course, we know who’s using. It would just be confirmation.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘you’ve got the wrong guy.’
Smuts were clinging to my face and hair and not for the first time that evening I caught myself wondering where I’d left my hat.
Neville stared at me for a long moment, fixing me with grey-blue eyes; his mouth was drawn straight and thin. ‘I don’t think so,’ he said.
I watched him walk, coat collar up, hat brim pulled down, until the fog had swallowed him up.
‘He’s a nasty bastard.’ The woman had reappeared and stepped up, almost silently, alongside me. Close to, I could see she was little more than a girl. Sixteen, seventeen. Her eyes seemed to belong to someone else’s face. ‘Don’t trust him,’ she said and shivered. ‘He’ll hurt you if he can.’
Ethel, I found out her name was later, and she was, in fact, nineteen. She showed me the birth certificate as proof. Ethel Maude Rastrick, born St Pancras Hospital, seven-teeth of March 1937. She kept it with a handful of letters and photographs in an old stationery box hidden away inside the chest of drawers in her room. Not the room where she worked, but the room where she lived. I got to see both in time.
But after that first brief meeting in the fog, I didn’t see her for several months. No more than I saw hide nor hair of Detective Sergeant Gordon Neville. I’d like to say I forgot them both, though in Neville’s case that wouldn’t be entirely true. Somehow I talked myself into a gig with a ten-piece band on a tour of second-rank dance halls — Nuneaton, Llandudno, Wakefield and the like — playing quicksteps and waltzes with the occasional hot number thrown in. The brass players were into booze, but two of the three reeds shared my predilection for something that worked faster on the pulse rate and the brain and, between us, we got by. As long as we turned up on time and played the notes, the leader cast a blind eye.
As a drummer, it was almost the last regular work I had. The same month Bulganin and Khrushchev visited Britain, the spring of ’56.
On my second night back in the smoke, I met Ethel again. I’d gone looking for Foxy, of course, looking to score, but to my bewilderment, Foxy hadn’t been there. Nobody had seen him in a week or more. Flash Winston was playing piano at the Modemaires and I sat around for a while until I’d managed to acquire some weed and then
