Well, Tony, I’m at your mercy. You’ve got my attention at last. Just make sure you look after my daughter.
Mark gathered up his belongings and started struggling towards the automatic doors as the train began to shunt to a stop.
You’ve got some explaining to do, Tony.
FIFTEEN
ONCE THEY HAD BEEN IN A ROCK-AND-ROLL BAND TOGETHER. IT WAS when they were fifth-years and most people were leaving school. They rehearsed in Tony’s living room because his mam went away at weekends to stay with a newsagent in Chilton. On Sunday nights she would return elated and bearing surplus copies of that day’s papers. The house was free all Saturday for the band and friends of the band to fill it with their black, laminated amplifiers, crushed lager cans and blue smoke.
Mark was the singer for a while but they stopped him because he screeched the high notes in songs like ‘Rebel, Rebel’ and spoiled it. Tony played guitar and he was in charge; it was he who had to relay the band’s instructions to Mark. Mark didn’t mind too much; he was happy simply to hang around on a Saturday, help out with the equipment and chat with the girlfriends of the band in Tony’s mam’s kitchen, where the dirty crockery would stack up through the long, noisy afternoons.
The other members of the band had already left school. Some were in the borstal up the road, or on remand, or they were about to go into the army after summer. Sometimes Mark thought Tony liked hanging about with boys who dressed hard and shaved their heads. Their girlfriends changed week in and week out, except for Pauline, who was the fat drummer’s girlfriends She wore heavy black eye make-up and her hair was bleached and stringy. She sat nervously at the edge of the settee with her cigarettes, tapping ash into a used beer can, and helping the drummer sort his kit out at the end. Eventually she was consigned with the other girls to the kitchen, after they had spent one afternoon laughing all the way through ‘Psycho Killer’, which the boys were committing to tape.
Working on the band, Tony was intent and gloomy. Only occasionally would he lighten up and enjoy himself. He was given to messing around, drawing long, blood-curdling screeches out of his guitar in the middle of the songs. These always overrode whatever the singer was screeching. This was another reason Mark had been happy to move over and leave them as a mostly instrumental band. Tony was unequivocally the star.
Mark still thought it unfair that the girls were banished while he was allowed to stay and watch. He had been laughing as much as they that time. Then he saw the reason: Tony had drawn up a band rule that was meant to get them to work more tightly as a unit and make them concentrate. It was a kind of forfeit game: the blinds were drawn down, and for every bum note or mistake they made, the band member had to remove an article of clothing. It would fine-tune their performance and loosen inhibitions, Tony told them.
The lads in the band looked at each other, laughed a bit, and finally shrugged. Yeah, whatever. Might be a laugh. Tony winked at Mark, who was sitting by the rubber plant. This was his leaving present to him. Of course he was allowed to stay and the girls must go out into the kitchen.
All that afternoon the band played hard. Their noise levels were higher than usual and Mark worried about the neighbours sending the coppers round, and the coppers finding the dope they occasionally broke off to roll into messy, powerful spliffs. The drummer launched into his strained rendition of ‘Wild Thing’ and it took hours to get through, with elongated passages of drum solos and guitar licks that howled needlessly through the middle of the piece. Mistakes were made and, laughing, the boys stripped off articles of clothing, which were dumped unceremoniously in a pile in the middle of the black cabling.
Tony was in his element. Mark could see him feeding off the slick electricity of the atmosphere. He watched him look up abstractedly from his playing—the best playing he’d ever done, they knew—and stare at the bass player, who was nonchalantly down to socks and underpants. Mark continued smoking, and was asked to sing a Banshees song, which he did, quickly, with only one lyrical mistake, for which he was told to take off his cardigan. The drummer insisted, laughing; starkers behind his kit, fat and sweating. Tony started to make mistakes that Mark knew were false until he was playing with his guitar alone covering him. Mark wondered if the others realised what was going on. He started to feel ashamed by the whole business. It was as if Tony were exposing the games that they played together in private to everyone. Tony had an erection, which they could see as he played, and which they would put down to rock and roll. No different from them getting out Pussy Talk on video, on a different Saturday afternoon, sitting with the cans and their cocks out, passing the Kleenex around and concentrating on the screen.
Mark left them to it and went to talk to Pauline. She was reading Smash Hits at the kitchen table. They talked about the drummer, Simon, and she said they were engaged. He wasn’t everything Pauline had dreamed of, but what the fuck else was she meant to expect? It was exotic enough that they had been to different comprehensives.
Just after six the rehearsal finished and Tony led the others out, to find Mark snogging with Pauline over the sink.
“I DON’T KNOW WHAT IT WAS ABOUT,” MARK PROTESTED THAT NIGHT in Tony’s squalid bathroom. Music was playing quietly, the tape of that afternoon’s better-than-usual
