Stories We Could Tell

His thoughts felt like they were being formed in quicksand. He could taste his stomach in his mouth. He pressed his clammy face against the tower block, moaning, and felt the entire skyscraper slide away from him. Surreal didn’t quite cover it. Terry had been poisoned.

And then Ray Keeley was standing before him.

Even through the thick fog of industrial-strength ganja, Terry knew it was him. Ray was wearing a Stetson, like Dennis Hopper in Easy Rider, and it made him look like a hallucination, a vision of the Old West glimpsed on the banks of the Thames.

Ray Keeley was only seventeen, but Terry had been reading his stuff for years. Every week Terry looked at Ray’s by-line picture in The Paper – he looked like those early shots of Jackson Browne, the open-faced matinee idol eyes peering out from behind the veil of long, lank, wheat-coloured hair – a teenage hippy heart-throb -and the envy came at Terry in waves, like a toothache.

Ray was the rising star on The Paper in the mid-Seventies, a pretty and precocious fifth-former rhapsodising about Joni Mitchell, Jackson Browne and the whole California thing that seemed so very far away now. And Ray liked the Beatles, especially the Beatles, even though they were further away than anything, even though they had broken up a full six years ago, and John was hiding in the Dakota and Paul was touring with his wife and Ringo was banging out the novelty records and George was disappearing up his own Hari Krishna.

You read Ray Keeley and you forgot about the three-day week and the miners’ strike and the streets full of rat-infested rubbish that no one was ever going to collect. All the grey dreariness slipped away when you read Ray Keeley on seeing Dylan at Wembley, reviewing Joni Mitchell’s Court and Spark, even trying to give Wings the benefit of the doubt. You read Ray and suddenly it was yesterday once more, summer in the Sixties, the party that everyone under the age of twenty-five had missed. You forgot about Ted Heath and thought about making love to Joni in the dunes on the beach at Monterey.

But Ray wasn’t writing so much lately.

‘You all right?’ he asked Terry, with the expression of one who already knew the answer.

Terry shook his head, speechless, feeling as if his body was paralysed and his mind was broken and his tongue was the size of an oven glove.

Then Ray did something unexpected. He put his arm around him. ‘You’ve got to take it easy with that stuff,’ he said. ‘These guys are used to it. You’re not. Come on, let’s get you back to the office. Before someone shops us.’

‘How’d you know?’ Terry mumbled. ‘How’d you know me from The Paper?’

Ray grinned. ‘Not from Horse and Hounds, are you?’ Terry laughed. ‘Nah!’

Ray half-dragged and half-carried Terry back to the office, and sat him at his desk, and gave him orange juice and black coffee until the shivering and the sweating and the sickness began to subside. Ray took care of Terry when he had been left to melt in the dirt by a couple of the older guys, and it was a simple act of decency that Terry would never forget. He tried to thank him but his tongue was a dead weight.

‘Be cool, man,’ Ray told him. ‘Just take it easy now.’

All that first morning people had been telling Terry to be cool and take it easy. The music had changed, and most of the haircuts, and people were throwing away their flares and buying straight-legged trousers, but the language was still largely the lexicon of the Sixties.

For all the changes, for all the new things, a different language had yet to be invented. All that old-fashioned jive about being mellow and taking it easy and loving one another was still around. Be cool. Take it easy.

All that first morning these worn-out old words had sounded empty to Terry Warboys. But he found himself giving his new friend a stoned, wonky smile.

Because Terry thought that when Ray Keeley said these things, they actually sounded as though they meant something.

Ray let himself into the house, and was immediately assaulted by the smell of home-brewed beer and the sound of the television.

‘Miss Belgian Congo is a nineteen-year-old beautician who says her ambition is to travel, end all wars and meet Sacha Distel.’

‘Back again, are you?’ the old man shouted, not stirring from his chair in front of the TV. ‘Like a bloody hotel…’

It was true. Ray treated his parents’ suburban semi like a hotel, coming and going without warning, never staying long. But the funny thing was he treated hotels like they were home. The last two nights, when he had been in the Holiday Inn in Birmingham and Travel Lodge in Leicester, he could not stop himself from making his hotel bed in the morning. It was as if his home was out there somewhere.

Ray ran upstairs to his room, hardly registering the presence of his younger brother sprawled on his bed, reading a football magazine.

After chucking his bag in a corner Ray knelt before the stereo on his side of the room. The pose made him seem like a religious supplicant, but when he ran his fingers along the spine of his record collection, it was like a lover – familiar, loving, taking his time, and knowing exactly what was there before he had even looked.

The records were alphabetically filed. The As were sparse and unplayed for years – Alice Cooper and Argent and Abba and Atomic Rooster – but B was for The White Album, Abbey Road, Revolver, Rubber Soul, Let It Be, A Hard Day’s Night…B was for Beatles galore.

He pulled out Abbey Road, and the boys marching in single file across that zebra crossing brought back twenty melodies. Ray knew that street in St John’s Wood better than he knew the road where he lived.

The white VW parked on the pavement, the curious passer-by in the distance, and the unbroken blue of a cloudless summer sky. And the four of them, all with a role to play. George in denim -the gravedigger. Paul barefoot – the corpse. Ringo in his long black drape – the undertaker. And John in white – the angel.

Ray replaced Abbey Road. Almost idly, his index finger fell upon the Ds – Blood on the Tracks by Dylan, Morrison Hotel and L.A. Woman by the Doors, The Golden Hour of Donovan, The Best of Bo Diddley and…For Your Pleasure. For Your Pleasure? Ray’s handsome face frowned at the cracked cardboard spine. What were Roxy Music doing among the Ds? Ray glared across at Robbie.

His twelve-year-old brother was reclining on his bed with a copy of Shoot! It was double games on Tuesday afternoons and there was a smudge of mud running right across the bridge of Robbie’s nose, like war paint on the face of a Red Indian.

‘You been touching my records again?’ Ray said.

‘No way, José,’ Robbie said, not looking up from a feature on Charlie George.

Ray furiously filed Roxy Music next to the Rolling Stones, where they belonged. Then he turned back to his kid brother.

‘Don’t touch my records, okay? And if you do touch my records don’t, but if you do – put them back in the right place, okay? You don’t put Roxy Music in with Dylan and the Doors.’

Robbie mimed a yawn. ‘I’ve got my own records,’ he said.

Ray laughed. ‘Yeah, Disney Favourites and Alvin Stardust’s Greatest Hits.’

Robbie looked up, stung. It was the brutal truth. Robbie only owned two records.

‘I’m getting In the City for Christmas.’ His brother had recently seen the Jam on Top of the Pops. It had been love at first sight. ‘Mum’s getting it for me.’

Ray ignored his brother. Bickering with a kid was beneath him. He pulled out Pretzel Logic by Steely Dan, the cover – that old man selling pretzels, that frozen American street – as familiar as the bedroom he shared with his baby brother. It was as if his record collection was the real world, and the place where he lived was the dream.

He loved the way that albums demanded your attention. The way you held them in both hands and they filled your vision and all you could see was their beauty. For a moment he thought of the girl last night, the Bouquet of Barbed Wire press officer.

There was a girl on the cover of Pretzel Logic, in the background, walking away, hair long and trousers flared, a girl that probably looked just like Ali McGraw in Love Story. He wondered about her life, and who she loved, and how he could ever meet her. Ray Keeley ached for a girl of his own. Holding that album was like holding that girl. Or as close as he would ever get.

‘Ray! Robbie! Your tea’s ready,’ his mother called up from the foot of the stairs. Ray sighed with appreciation as he closed the sleeve.

His father was sitting in his favourite armchair like some suburban sultan while his mum carried plates of bread and jam into the front room. Ray’s parents were an unlikely match – his mother a small nervous woman, jumping at shadows, his father as broad as he was tall, a bull of a man in carpet slippers, and these days always on the edge of anger.

Above the new fireplace – the real fire had just been ripped out and replaced with a gas job that had fake coals and unlikely-looking flames – there were photographs in silver frames.

Ray’s parents on their wedding day. Ray and his two brothers John and Robbie on a sightseeing junk in Hong Kong harbour, three little kids – Robbie small, Ray medium and John large – smiling and squinting in the blazing sub-tropical sunshine. Their father grinning proudly in the light khaki of the Hong Kong Police Force, looking like an overgrown boy scout in his shorts and woolly socks, his bony knees colonial white.

Somewhere in the middle Sixties the photographs turned from black and white to colour. And among the colour photos there was John, eighteen years old now, in the darker uniform of the British Army, taken just before he was killed when an IRA bomb went off on a country road in South Armagh. It was the most recent photograph. Nothing had been right since then.

On the television, young women in swimming suits and high heels were staring ahead with fixed smiles as Matt Monro moved among them singing ‘Thank Heaven for Little Girls’.

Ray and his mum sat on the sofa and Robbie sprawled between them on the floor. Everybody drank diluted orange cordial apart from his father, who had a cloudy glass of home-made beer by his feet.

‘Now how can you compare some tart from Bongo Bongo Land with some tart from England?’ he asked. ‘It’s not fair on them, is it? The darkies. Completely different standards of beauty.’

Ray rolled his eyes. The same old stuff, on and on, never ending. They said that travel broadened the mind. They had obviously never met his father.

‘I might marry a black woman,’ Ray said through a mouthful of Mother’s Pride and Robertson’s strawberry jam, the one with the smiling Golliwog cavorting on the jar. ‘Your grandchildren might be half black. Did that ever occur to you, Dad?’