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?’
A cloud seemed to pass across his father’s face. ‘What about the kids? The little half-castes? Did you ever think about them? Not belonging to any group. How do you think that feels?’
‘If we all got mixed up together then there wouldn’t be any more racism,’ Ray said. ‘Because then we would all be the same. Got any more blackcurrant, Mum?’
It was one of the things he argued about with his father. Along with the volume and value of his music, the length of his hair and John Lennon. It felt like they argued about everything these days. Ray wished he knew a black woman just so he could marry her and show his father that all men were brothers.
‘Birds of a feather,’ Ray’s father said, pointing his knife at Ray. ‘You don’t see robins flying about with crows, do you?’
‘Are you a crow, Dad? Are you a robin?’
‘She’s nice,’ his mum said. ‘Miss Korea. What one do you like, Robbie?’
‘I don’t like any of them!’ Robbie said, blushing furiously. Ray laughed. He knew that his brother liked all of them. He wasn’t fussy He had heard Robbie fiddling about in his stripy pyjamas when he thought that Ray was sleeping.
‘Enoch’s right,’ his father said. ‘Send them all back.’
‘What if they come from here?’ Ray said, pushing the last of his bread and jam into his mouth. ‘Where you going to send them back to, Dad?’
With his father still ranting about birds of a feather and beasts in the wild, Ray got up and carried his plate out to the kitchen and went upstairs to his bedroom. He knew what he needed, and put on the Who as loud as he dared – 5.15, sad and angry all at once, to match the way he felt.
Why should I care? Why should I care?
As he made sure that he had enough tube fare to get him back to the city, Ray remembered something he had heard at The Paper. Skip Jones had told him that taking heroin was like stepping into a golden bubble – your troubles melted away when you were in there. That was how Ray felt about his music. It made the world go away.
But from downstairs came the rank stench of home-made beer – bitter hops, liquid malt extract and priming syrup, the whole sorry mess fermenting in the huge metal vats for weeks at a time – and it almost made him gag. That was the problem with living at home with his parents.
Ray’s floor would always be his father’s ceiling.
Leon stood at the hermetically sealed windows of The Paper, watching the sun going down and the crowds leaving the tower block, scuttling to Waterloo station and home.
When he was certain that most of them had gone, he went to the washroom and stared into the mirror above the sink. He waited for a few moments, heard a cleaner clatter by, and then slowly removed his hat.
Leon’s hair was thick and wiry, like something you would use for scrubbing pans, but what was most striking about it was that a few hours earlier it had been dyed a virulent orange. Autumn Gold, it had said on the packet.
Leon winced as if he had been slapped. He quickly replaced his hat, gripped the brim with both hands and firmly pulled it down over his ears. It was a disaster. As always.
Leon hated his hair. And Leon’s hair hated him right back.
There was a line from a Rod Stewart song, back when Leon was fifteen years old and Rod was still big mates with John Peel and playing the working-class hero – kicking footballs around on Top of the Pops, pretending he was fresh off the terraces, before he developed that embarrassing taste for straw boaters and blazers and high-maintenance blondes and Art Deco lamps, and everyone had to pretend that they had never liked him in the first place.
