He was wearing the suit the first time Andy met him. They met in Sunderland, at Roker Park. It was 1987, the year of David Bowie’s Glass Spider tour, and they were on the same coach party from Darlington. Their relationship was cemented that warm, drizzly afternoon, standing in the pressing crowd, right at the front, right under the shadow of the sixty-foot-tall perspex spider that Bowie was going to perform on. Doggedly they kept their pole position in the stadium crowd and talked and talked for the hours until the evening concert was due to begin. Vince shared between them the cheese-and-pickle sandwiches his father had packed for him.
When Bowie came on, just yards ahead of them, it was with irony and aplomb, in his own lightweight, satiny suit, his own teased-up, bleached eighties hair, but he was also a terrible disappointment. It seemed that he had lost his edge. All his weirdness just seemed put on. But, jostled and pulled around by the mass of swaying bodies, Andy and Vince kept looking at each other.
Andy had come dressed in what Vince would soon recognise as only one of his many outfits. He had a separate guise for everything and, for that first meeting, he was done up as Bowie in 1976: the black suit, white shirt, powdered face and slicked-back hair. Bowie when he had integrity and a bone structure you could chop sticks with. Vince was looking increasingly less at the stage, more at the boy right by his side.
At the end of the concert there was no encore, because it had started to rain. Vince was thoroughly pissed off. Bowie’s one last chance to reprieve himself was the promised encore: singing ‘Time’ and being crucified on angel’s wings at the very top of the perspex spider. He’d done it at Wembley. Oh, but not in Sunderland. Course he wouldn’t do it in Sunderland. Vince stomped out of the stadium, through pissy-smelling underpasses, making for the car parks. All the while Andy kept pace with him. Their ears were ringing, they realised when Andy stopped to buy a T-shirt from a bloke by the exit.
They stood on the sparkling tarmac of the car park outside. Andy said, ‘I don’t really want this, I don’t know why I bought it.’
Vince was craning his neck, concerned that they’d never find their coach, or that it had already gone. ‘It’s a souvenir, I suppose.’
Impulsively Andy said, ‘You have it. I want you to have it.’ He held the T-shirt up. Bowie with that teased-up gold hair.
Vince smiled. ‘Cheers. Do you know where our coach will be? I forgot where they told us.’
‘Let’s go and look on the main road.’
The main road was right on the coast. The sea was high on Wearside that night, crashing in thin waves on to the path and the road itself. There were coaches and stragglers tunelessly singing ‘Let’s Dance’ everywhere up the road.
‘What if we don’t get our coach?’ Vince said, starting to worry.
Andy had pulled his leather jacket back on. The wind was unsticking his slicked-back hair. He was strolling nonchalantly, gazing out at the black sea. It was as if the rush and panic of the other seventy thousand people flooding out of the stadium at midnight hardly touched him. He couldn’t share their consternation or enthusiasm at all. He was walking, leading Vince further down the coastal road, away from the noise. ‘It would be all right,’ he said. ‘It would be all right even if we did get stuck here. My nanna lives down in Shields. Two miles down the road. She’d put us up.’
‘Oh.’ Vince marvelled at how easily he could come up with contingency plans.
‘Do you really fancy sitting on a coach with fifty Dario Bowie fans singing “China Girl” and throwing up in the gangway?’
On the way the tour guide had made the whole coach watch a Freddie Starr Live video. Vince didn’t relish the thought of more of the same.
They carried on walking in silence. He looked behind to see the lights of the coaches swaying and bobbing, moving away, back towards the motorway. That reminded him of something. As the coaches roared past on the coastal road, their lights rearing up and receding, excitable faces pressed to the window, something came back into his mind irresistibly.
‘It’s like Pinocchio,’ he said, putting the T-shirt over his head as the drizzle worsened and the great lit-up coaches went thundering by.
‘You what?’ asked Andy, who was starting to think they really had missed their coach. And it was his fault. They would have to get a taxi to his nanna’s. She would have to put them up in her back parlour. Even wet and tired Andy found the idea strangely exciting. He huddled into his jacket and turned to Vince. ‘What did you say about Pinocchio?’
In the downpour Vince was blushing. This was part of his private mythology. He said, ‘In Pinocchio there’s that island where they tempt all the bad boys to go. The bad lads’ land. It’s where they think they’re gonna have this smashing time with gambling and booze and messing round, and then they all turn into donkeys. Pinocchio goes there, tempted by his friend Lichinoro, who says they can go and have the time of their lives.’
Andy was smiling, watching the traffic. ‘I remember.’
‘Anyway,’ Vince went on, ‘in the book I had, it described this bit with all the wagons going off to the shore, with the boys bound for the island, for the bad lads’ land. And it said there was a fat jolly coachman hanging off the front, taunting Pinocchio for being scared. And all the boys clinging on, laughing. It said that the wagons’ lanterns were swinging and lurching in the darkness and horns were hooting. And Pinocchio was jumping up and down going, “Wait for me! I’m coming too!”’
He fell
