Espedair Street

how we suddenly started talking about sex.

'Really?' I said.

'Yeah,' Tumber served again. 'Twice in twenty minutes.' I missed a topspin slam completely and had to follow the bouncing ball across the tiles again.

'Wow,' I said.

'Yeah.' Rick got ready to serve, and I crouched, feeling tiger-tense and twice as fearsome, and staring at the point on the table where I expected the ball to bounce. Then Rick straightened again, rubbed his chin and looked up to the roof. I looked on, aghast. 'I mean, it was a while ago. The record was Let It Be...' He frowned, crossed his arms, seemed to say more to himself than to me, 'Now who's flat were we using? I always thought it was that one in Argyll Street, but...'

'Serve!' I shouted at him. He started as though he'd just noticed me, and crouched to serve again, the ball held in his left palm like some strange plastic offering.

'Sorry,' he said. 'Will I serve now?'

'Yes!' I screamed.

He served.

'Aah!' I yelped, returning.

'Well anyway; you should have seen this girl, Dan. What a body. I swear her tits didn't change shape when she lay down. That usually means silicon, but she was one hundred per cent natural, believe me. We'd done it once and then we just started doing it again, and, well, fucking zap-pow, man... anyway we were still lying there panting and quivering when the side finished and the turntable switched itself off, and I got up, dripping everywhere, and turned the album over, and then went back to bed, and...'

'And turned her over...' I laughed, which gained me a point when Tumber laughed, and missed the ball. My turn to serve.

'You asshole, Weird,' Tumber said.

We played a short rally which I lost, of course. Rick served again. 'So I'd come twice in twenty minutes, and I thought, 'Hey, that's pretty good; you must be some sort of sexual athlete there, Ricky boy.''

'I wonder if they have heats for sexual athletics,' I pondered aloud.

, And I started,' Rick went on, 'timing myself like that, with sounds. Doing that deliberately, just to see, you know? I wanted to keep a check on my performance.'

'Uh-huh,' I said. I lost another point.

'Yeah,' Tumber said, serving again. 'I only stopped doing it with Judy... you remember Judy? When I was in love?'

'I remember. You seemed almost human for a while. It was disconcerting.'

'Thanks. Anyway I stopped doing it with Judy cos it felt wrong, and even after we split up I didn't do it because I'd sort of forgotten about it, and then a couple of months ago I was screwing these two gorgeous black chicks, and I'd just put Brothers In Arms on, and I humped one then the other, and it finished and I realised I'd done it again; twice within one side, and, like, I was completely exhausted, but I was so fucking pleased I'd done it, and then I realised ...'

'What?' I said, missing the ball again and going after it. It bumped up against a box full of Rumanian plum jam.

'It was a fucking compact disc, man,' Tumber said, disgustedly. 'I'd taken about fifty fucking minutes and I felt twice as knackered.' He shook his head. 'Jeez, was I pissed off.'

'My heart bleeds for you,' I told him. 'My bladder leaks for you; my pituitary secretes for you. What were you doing in bed with these two women, anyway?'

'What do you think I was doing?'

'Asking them, was it good for you two?'

'Wrong. In fact, they're a double act. I'm thinking of signing them.'

'I didn't know you'd formalised your relationships to quite that extent,' I said, and actually won a point. Tumber tossed the ball back to me.

'My relationships are changing a lot, Danny. I'm getting careful in my old age.' Rick stood up suddenly from the crouched position he'd assumed to receive my serve, put his hands on his hips and said, frowning with annoyance, 'Christ, isn't it a fucking bore wearing those goddamn willy wellies?'

I didn't move, but looked up from my serving stance and said, 'Yes.'

'Never mind,' Tumber said, crouching again and winning off the return. 'I'm laughing; I used the profit on my Telecom shares to buy into London International.'

'Asshole,' I told him.

'That's about the size of it.' he grinned.

We sat in the restaurant of the Albany hotel, Rick's usual base on the rare occasions when he visits me.

We finished our game of table-tennis. He'd won, of course, though I did score a couple of points, which I always regard as a moral victory. We'd had some more coke, talked for an hour or so about The Business, bad- mouthing everybody we could think of, then we drove the couple of hundred yards to the Albany in Rick's hired GTS (though only after he'd complained about the car-hire people at the airport not having a black Porsche to match his glasses; a red Ferrari was all very well, but it clashed).

When I'd woken up that morning I'd put on what I'd been wearing the night before, so I was just about respectable enough to be allowed into the Albany, once I'd put my tie on.

The meal was all right, though Rick made a fuss over the wine, and I'd insisted on tomato sauce with my Chateaubriand, just to be awkward. We sat back, belching and slurping brandy; Rick sucked on a Havana cigar. While we'd talked, I'd felt several times that Rick had steered clear of something, a subject that he didn't want to raise, but I hadn't tried to find out what it was. There were, anyway, two things perhaps; what he'd come to talk about, and whatever disaster he'd awkwarded his way round earlier. I was trying not to think about anything too deeply. I just sat with the man and pretended it was like old times.

'... God, yes, I remember that party.' Rick laughed. 'Amanda caught me screwing Judy in the flowerbeds; bitch tried to run me through with a rake, or a hoe, or something agricultural like that.'

'Horticultural,' I said. 'And rake would have been appropriate,' I said, drying my eyes.

We'd been reminiscing about the parties Davey had given at the mansion in Kent, and Rick had been telling me about the time Davey had lost control of his traction engine during a tug of war with Wes' Range Rover, a local farmer's tractor and his own Daytona (with Christine at the controls). He'd won, but — accidentally he claimed — drove the machine into the main marquee, through the bar and over several tables, scattering shrieking guests like hens before a car. He hit one of the two main tent supports, demolished half the marquee and set fire to the rest; it must have been one of the few fires that year put out with a combination of water transmitted from an ornamental pool by an ice-bucket line, and champagne. I'd missed that particular soiree, but the ones I'd been to had been only marginally less interesting.

Rick and I had reached that stage where neither of us could think of any more appropriate stories, so just sat there for a few moments, shaking our heads and sniffing and drying our eyes.

I took a deep breath. 'So, what brings you up here anyway?' I asked him.

He sat back, swirled brandy. 'How do you feel about making another album?'

'Terrible. The answer's no.'

'Well, have you really thought about it? People in the business are asking me about you, without me having to ask; they all want to know if you're going to do anything again. We get letters from fans asking where you are and if you're working on some new project; the interest is there, Dan. I mean, with Personal Effects doing so well, and after all this time; you'd be crazy not to think about it.'

'Is it doing well?' I said. 'I didn't know.' Personal Effects was the album I'd released as a solo effort — though with lots of session people, of course — in '82, a couple of years after the band broke up. I'd been all fired up and enthusiastic about it at the time -I'd taken a year and a half off after Miami and I was missing recording and playing — but when it came out... I don't know. I'd lost interest.

Happened even before it came out, come to think of it; I remember sitting at a mixing console one day, talking over the right balance for some track or other, and I just suddenly felt, What the hell? What does any of this really matter?, and I could never summon up the enthusiasm again, after that. Not for