Stories We Could Tell

Terry’s mum paused, but kept playing, and Terry’s dad guffawed with delight.

‘She’s forgotten the words,’ he said, embarrassed at his fierce pride in his wife and her gift. But she hadn’t forgotten the words.

‘But until the day that one comes along…’

And here she gave a rueful look at Terry’s dad.

‘I’ll string along with you.’

Misty stared at Terry’s mum with an expression of total seriousness, as if she was in church, or in the presence of Truffaut saying something profound.

Misty had once told Terry that she’d never tasted instant coffee until after she had left home. And he knew that his mum would end the dinner with coffee that came out of a jar from Nescafé. He also knew that his mum would probably add sugar and milk without asking Misty if she wanted any or not, the way you were supposed to, and he knew that someone was going to have to wash up those prawn cocktail teaspoons before they could stir their Nescafé.

But as he watched his girlfriend watching his mum pick out that old song, Terry felt for the first time that none of that stuff mattered very much.

The train shook Ray Keeley awake.

He brushed a veil of long blond hair out of his bleary eyes and stared at the harvest fields, the scattering of farm houses, a couple of mangy horses. One hour to London, he thought.

Ray knew those fields, could read them like a clock. He even recognised the horses. He had been passing through this part of the country for three years, since he was fifteen years old, heading north to see bands on tour in Newcastle and Leicester, Manchester and Liverpool, Leeds and Glasgow, and then coming back to London to write about them.

He realised what had woken him. There were voices drifting through the carriage, loud and coarse, effing and blinding. A bunch of football fans were approaching, on their way to the dining car. At least they looked like football fans – long floppy feather cuts, short-sleeve shirts that were tighter than a coat of emulsion, and flared trousers that stopped some distance from their clunky boots. Feeling a familiar shiver of fear, he sunk deeper into his rock-hard British Rail seat, allowing his fringe to fall over his face, hoping to hide from the world.

Ray knew their type, and knew what they would make of him with his long hair, denim jacket, white jeans and cowboy boots. But they were more interested in finding lager than tormenting a lone hippy kid, and guffawed their way out of the far end of the carriage.

Ray closed his eyes. He didn’t feel good. He couldn’t remember sleeping last night, although he knew he must have at some point, because he couldn’t remember when the woman had left his hotel room.

She was the press officer from the record company, there to make sure that Ray got into the shows and got to interview the lead singer while they were travelling from one town to the next. He liked her a lot – she looked a bit like the girl in Bouquet of Barbed Wire, and she knew her music. But Ray knew that the next time they met she would act as though nothing much had happened. That’s what it was like. You were meant to take these things lightly.

He always felt a bit down coming off the road. You were tired. You were hungover. There was a ringing in your ears from seeing two shows and two sound checks in the last forty-eight hours. And there was always some girl you liked who would be somewhere else tonight. And of course you were going home.

The youths came back, swigging from cans of Carlsberg Special Brew, a few of them leering at Ray with amused belligerence. He stared out of the window, trying to control his breathing, feeling his heart pounding inside his denim jacket. They were everywhere these days. But they’re nothing compared to my father, he thought. My father would kill them.

Then he must have fallen asleep again, because when he awoke the sun was low, and it took Ray one foggy moment to realise that the fields were gone, there were graffiti-stained walls all around and people were collecting their bags as the train pulled into Euston.

16th August 1977, and here comes the night.

Chapter Two (#u04cd971b-b147-5c40-95f1-823ceb340158)

As Misty steered her father’s Ford Capri along the Westway towards the city, Terry laid his right hand lightly on her leg, feeling the warmth of her flesh through the white dress, idly wondering what their children would look like, and loving that little swoon of longing he got every time he looked at her.

Misty was nineteen years old – three years younger than Terry – and although they had grown up within a few miles of each other, he was aware they were from very different places. More like different planets than different parts of the London sprawl. Misty’s family rode horses and Terry’s family bet on them.

He was born in a rented room above a butcher’s shop and she grew up in a house crammed with books, her childhood full of pony clubs and prep schools, her old man some sort of hotshot lawyer – that’s where the money came from. She was a bit vague about it all, but then you had to be embarrassed about it now, privilege was nothing to boast about in the summer of 1977.

But she didn’t need to spell it out. Terry knew they were different. She knew where she was going and he kept expecting to be sent back to where he had escaped from. It wasn’t as bad as it had been at the beginning. It wasn’t as bad as his first day at The Paper. But then nothing could ever be as bad as that.

The memory of his humiliation could still make his face burn. Even now – with a girlfriend like Misty, with a friend like Dag Wood, with his latest story on the cover – the thought of that first day made him cringe.

This is how raw Terry was – he tried to return a review record. One of the older guys gave him a month-old album that nobody else was interested in, pointed him in the direction of the review room and left him to it. And when Terry had finished, when he had come up with his 300 smart-arse words on Be Bop Deluxe, he walked into the office where a few of the older guys sat, and he tried to give back the album. How they laughed! And how his face burned and burned.

He knew that one of the reasons he had been hired was because of the way he looked – that On the Waterfront thing that was back in style. The music wanted to be tough again. And there he was on his first morning, a Be Bop Deluxe record in his hand, his face all red and tears in his ears. He wouldn’t have minded their amusement if they had been nothing to him, but these were writers he had admired for years. And they were laughing at him. They thought he was funny.

This was his dream job and it felt like he had just strolled into it. Desperate for new writers to cover the new music, The Paper had responded to Terry’s carefully typed and Tipp-Exed reflections on Born to Run and a review of the Damned at the 100 Club (Bruce Springsteen and Rat Scabies – a nice combination of old and new school). They invited him into the office, where he met Kevin White, the ex-Mod editor who had practically invented The Paper, and White was quietly impressed that Terry had already seen some of the new bands live, and he liked the way Terry looked in his cheap leather jacket – luckily the interview was immediately after Terry had just pulled a night shift in the gin factory, so he looked fashionably knackered.

They hired him as a trainee journalist to cover this new music that was just starting to happen, this new music that none of the existing writers liked all that much or could even get a handle on. But getting the job turned out to be the easy bit.

Terry had once had a girlfriend who broke it off outside a Wimpy Bar, so he thought he knew about women. He had once smoked a joint that was more Rothman’s King Size than Moroccan Red, so he thought he knew about drugs. And he had left school as soon as he could for a job in the local gin factory – a purely temporary measure until he became a world-famous writer – so he thought he knew about the real world. But Terry soon discovered that he knew nothing.

That terrible first day. He didn’t know what to say – this young man who had always loved books, who had always loved words -it was as if he had lost the power of speech. He couldn’t talk the way the older guys talked – the way they said everything with that never-ending cynical amusement, the ironic mocking edge that placed them above the rest of the world. Already he felt that he could write as well as any of them – apart from Skip Jones himself, obviously – but Terry didn’t know the rules. How was he supposed to know you kept review copies? Until today he’d had to save up for any record he wanted.

It was like everyone else was speaking a language he didn’t understand. He had a lot of catching up to do. Maybe too much. Maybe he would never catch up. And then he saw Misty’s face for the very first time. And then he really knew that he was out of his depth.

One of the older guys parked Terry in the office he was to share with Leon Peck and Ray Keeley, the other young writers. Neither of them were there – Ray was at a Fleetwood Mac press conference somewhere in the West End, and Leon was on the road with Nils Lofgren. So while Terry waited for one of the older guys to find him something to do after finishing Be Bop Deluxe, he played with his typewriter, and looked in the drawers of his empty desk. And then he heard her, explaining something to the picture editor, and climbed on his desk to see the owner of that cool, confident voice.

The office was divided by grey, seven-foot-high partitions that made up the individual offices. It looked like a corporate maze. But if you knelt on your desk you could see over the top of the partitions. Two offices down he saw her – shockingly gorgeous, although he could not work out why. It was something to do with the way she carried herself. But he felt it for the first time – the little swoon of longing.

‘I’ve gone for a look of emptiness and stillness,’ she was telling the picture editor. ‘I think you’ll find it’s redolent of the Gerard Malanga shots of Warhol and the Velvet Underground.’

She had been taking pictures of Boney M.

Together Misty and the picture editor were poring over her contact sheets, these glossy black sheets of paper with tiny photographs – Terry had never seen a contact sheet before – drawing lines in red felt-tip around the shots they liked, then finally choosing one image by placing a cross next to it. Like a kiss, Terry thought, knowing already that it was hopeless. She was way out of his league.

‘I know they’re ridiculous,’ Misty was saying. ‘But it’s like Warhol himself said, Everybody’s plastic, but I love plastic.’

She looked up then and caught Terry’s eye and he attempted a smile that came out as an idiot leer. She frowned impatiently, and it just made her look prettier, and made him ache with hopeless yearning. And just then the two older guys came for him.

They loped into his office with no door, all faded denim and lank hair, untouched by the changes happening on what Terry and everyone else on The Paper thought of as the street.

‘Smoke, man?’ one of them said.

Terry was immediately on his feet, practically snapping to attention, and holding out a packet of Silk Cut. And the older guys looked at each other and smiled.

Five minutes later Terry felt like he was dying.

With the giant spliff still in his hand, Terry shivered and shuddered, the sweat pouring down his face, his back, making his capped T-shirt stick to his skin. He wanted to lie down. He wanted to be sick. He wanted it all to be over.

The older guys had stopped cackling with laughter and were starting to look concerned. Their faces swam in front of Terry’s rolling eyes. One of them prised the joint from Terry’s fist.

‘Are you okay, man?’

‘He’s really wasted, man.’

They were in the shadow of the monstrous grey tower block that was home to The Paper – an entire skyscraper full of magazines about every subject under the sun, from stamp collecting and hunting foxes and cars and football and knitting all the way to music, three titles on every floor – loitering in a scrap of wasteland that doubled as a makeshift car park, overlooking a silvery patch of the Thames and the mournful tug boats.

‘Don’t feel well,’ Terry croaked. ‘Might sit down. Until feel better.’

The older guys went, leaving him to his fate. It was…now what was the word? What was the word that people on The Paper had used all morning when something was even slightly out of the ordinary, like the lady who came round with the sandwiches running out of cheese-and-tomato rolls? Oh yes – Terry remembered the word. It was surreal.