ducked under a sign that said STRICTLY NO ENTRY and ran to him. She wasn’t the kind who cared about signs, she moved through the world as if she had a right to be there – anywhere, everywhere. Like a woman in a book, like a girl in a song.
‘Look, Tel,’ she said.
She had the most recent copy of The Paper in her hands. Almost a week old, and somehow the ink was still damp, and her fingertips were black, and there on the cover was a gaunt, grim-faced man with platinum blond hair standing in a trench coat by a great wall with a sign that said, Achtung! Sie verlassen jetzt West Berlin.
Terry’s story on Dag Wood, written on a hotel laundry bag and phoned in from Berlin.
‘So what’s he like?’ Misty said, and he had to laugh, because normally the question drove him nuts.
You wrote a 3,000-word piece about someone and then everybody asked you, What’s he like then? What he was like was in the story, it was always in the story, or the story had failed. When Tom Wolfe wrote about Muhammad Ali, or Phil Spector, or Hugh Hefner, did people say, Yeah, Tom, but what are they really like? Probably. But Terry didn’t mind. As it was her. As it was Misty.
‘He’s the greatest,’ Terry said. ‘I’ll introduce you tonight, okay?’
Then Misty had that look in her eye, that sleepy, faraway look, and she was tilting her head to one side, so Terry placed his mouth on her mouth, and felt her fingers running through his dyed black hair, and the cameras that were stuffed inside her shoulder bag pressed through his Oxfam jacket and against his heart.
Their kisses tasted of Marlboro and Juicy Fruit, and as they snogged at the arrivals gate, completely wrapped up in each other, oblivious to the smirks and stares and snide comments – ‘What are that pair supposed to be dressed as, Dad?’ – neither of them doubted that their kisses would taste that way for ever.
Leon Peck was doing the singles.
He sat in the review room, the little corridor-shaped cubbyhole with a stereo where they went to listen to new music, and all around him were the week’s releases, maybe a hundred or more seven-inch 45s, some of them in the new-fangled coloured vinyl and picture sleeves.
Convention demanded that Leon found something to rave about – The Single of the Week – and then picked twenty or thirty other singles that were worthy of a cheap joke that could be told in one pithy, piss-taking paragraph.
A kind of spiteful irreverence had always been a part of The Paper’s appeal, and just under the title of every issue the readers were promised, ‘Hotsies, groovies, goldies and a rootin’, tootin’ tab of vicious controversy’. That was exactly what Leon needed to conjure up for his singles page. A rootin’, tootin’ tab of vicious controversy.
Except he couldn’t be bothered.
Something had happened to Leon at the weekend that made slagging off – let’s see, what do we have here? – ‘Float On’ by the Floaters or ‘Easy’ by the Commodores or ‘Silver Lady’ by David ‘Starsky’ Soul – or was he ‘Hutch’? – seem beneath him.
Something had happened at the weekend that had changed the way Leon looked at the world. So he picked up ‘Silver Lady’ -Starsky or Hutch grinning like a lobotomised Osmond on the picture sleeve – and flung it across the room like a Frisbee. The seven-inch slice of vinyl shattered with a satisfying, surprisingly loud crack against the far wall. It felt good.
So good in fact that Leon did the same with ‘Float On’. And then ‘Easy’. And then ‘You Got What It Takes’ by Showaddywaddy. Leon picked up ‘Fanfare for the Common Man’, the new single by Emerson, Lake and Palmer, and that was tossed with particular venom. Soon the review room was covered in shards of splintered vinyl.
Leon pushed back the stacks of singles and began leafing through the most recent issue of The Paper, sighing at the soul-shrivelling trivia of it all. Didn’t these people know what was going on in the world?
There was Dag Wood on the cover, doing his tired old heroic-junkie routine by the Berlin Wall. Leon was pleased for Terry – could imagine him puffing up with pride at the sight of his story on the cover – but come on. As if Lou Reed hadn’t done it all first and better! As if Dag Wood actually knew the difference between Karl Marx and Groucho!
Terry’s such a sucker for all that rock-god schtick, Leon thought. They all are up here.
Leon yawned, and turned to page two, sighing at the sight of the charts. Mindless disco crud ruled the singles – Donna Summer faking multiple orgasms all over ‘I Feel Love’ – and, top of the albums, music to help tranked-out housewives hobble through the menopause. The Johnny Mathis Collection.
Leon snorted with derision. He flicked through The Paper, his fingers, like his mood, becoming blacker by the second.
Eater to record first album during school holidays…new singles by Pilot, Gentle Giant and the Roy Wood Band…new albums by Ry Cooder, Boney M and the Modern Lovers…
And then – finally! – at the bottom of page 11, jostled into a corner by a massive ad for Aerosmith at Reading and a world exclusive on the break-up of Steeleye Span, there were a few brief paragraphs that held Leon’s interest and made his heart start pumping. The piece had his by-line.
The National Front plan to parade through a black neighbourhood this coming weekend. Hiding their racist views behind an anti-mugging campaign and countless Union Jacks, the NF plan to leave from Clifton Rise, New Cross. Their route and the time of the march remain undisclosed.
A peaceful counter demonstration planned by local umbrella group the All Lewisham Campaign Against Racism and Fascism (ALCARAF) will assemble in Ladywell Fields, next to the British Rail Ladywell Station, at 11 a.m.
Be there or be square.
The magazine had appeared on newsstands nationwide the previous Thursday, and in London as far back as last Wednesday. A lifetime away, thought Leon. Because last Saturday the march and the counter demonstration had combined to produce the biggest riot London had seen since the war. And Leon Peck had been there.
I was there, he thought, touching the bruise on his cheekbone where he had been clipped by the knee of a policeman on horse-back. I saw it happen. While many of his peers were dreaming of seeing Aerosmith at Reading, Leon had been in the middle of the riot at Lewisham, crushed in with the protesters being forced back by the police and their horses, and he had felt as if the world was ending.
Flags waving, bricks flying, policemen on horses riding into the crowds, the battle lines ebbing and flowing – screaming, righteous chaos all around. Orange smoke bombs on Lewisham High Street, the air full of masonry, dustbins, bottles and screams, taunts, chanting. The sound of plate-glass windows collapsing.
What he remembered most was the physical sensation of the riot, the way he experienced it in his blood and bones. His legs turning to water with terror as the air filled with missiles and the police spurred their horses into the crowd, his heart pumping at the sight of the loathing on the faces of the marchers, and the raging anger he felt at the sight of these bigots parading their racist views through a neighbourhood where almost everyone was black.
He had never felt so scared in his life. And yet there was never a place where he was so glad to be.
It mattered. It mattered
