Goodnight Steve McQueen (25 page)

“You spent Saturday night watching Blind Date and ordering a take away curry, then?”

“No. We spent Saturday night getting pissed with Ruth’s partner Bob.”

“Bob?”

“Yeah. If you hadn’t made up with me I was planning on promoting him to the status of new best friend.”

“What about me?”

“What about you?”

“Well,” says Matty, ‘surely if anyone is going to be promoted to new best friend it should be me.”

“Not necessarily,” I say, pouring some extra salt on my bacon.

“What do you mean, not necessarily?”

“What I say. I mean, think about it. Can you get Formula One tickets and introduce me to Elizabeth Hurley?”

“No … I can’t.”

“Do you have a million-gi gabob computer and a cupboard full of twenty-five-year-old malt whisky?”

“No … I don’t.”

“Do you belong to a private members’ club in the City and drive a Saab convertible with central locking and tinted windows?”

“No. I don’t.”

“Well, then, on what grounds do you think I should promote you to new best friend?”

“Dunno,” he says quietly. “Let me think about it for a minute.”

The three of us get on with our breakfasts in silence and I can almost see Matty’s brain ticking over while he eats. He nearly thinks of something a couple of times but then he stops, shakes his head and goes back to buttering his toast. It’s at least five minutes before he decides that he’s cracked it.

“Right, then,” he says, pointing his butter knife straight at me. “I’ve got it. This is good. This is definitely going to do it.”

“Go on, then, I’m all ears.”

“Well, Bob might be mates with Mika Hakkinen but I bet he can’t do my trick.”

“What trick?”

“The one where I put a condom up my nose, pull it out of my mouth and run it backwards and forwards through my sinuses like a giant piece of dental floss.”

I mull this over for a while and then I say:

“No, Matty. You’re right there. I don’t think Bob would know how to do that.”

“So I’m in, then, am I?”

“Yeah,” I say, laughing. “You’re in. Had Vince refused to apologise over the infamous hummus fork incident you would rightfully have been promoted to the position of brand-new best friend.”

“Wicked.”

“Good, then.”

“Excellent.”

“That’s settled, then.”

“Mega.”

“Matty?”

“Yes, Danny?”

“You do realise you’re not actually being promoted to new best friend, don’t you?”

“Yeah, ‘course, but if Vince gets killed in a nasty road accident or something, something where his guts are splattered all over the place and all his limbs are hanging off … it’s definitely going to be me that gets promoted and not Bob?”

“Yes, Matty. It’s definitely going to be you and not Bob.”

“OK then.”

“OK.”

“But… I was wondering, though,” he says, chewing thoughtfully on one of his chips, ‘what about if he’s only brain damaged?”

“Brain damaged?”

“Yeah. What if Vince isn’t actually dead? What if he’s just brain damaged?”

“Well, then, I suppose it would depend on how bad it was.”

“Really bad,” says Matty enthusiastically.

“Coma?”

“Yeah.”

“Dribbling?”

“Yeah.”

“Loss of bowel function… loss of speech… failure to recognise Kevin Rowland in a hastily organised band lineup?”

“Yeah.”

“Hmmn,” I say. “It would be a pretty close call but, on balance, I’d reckon I’d still promote you to the position of new best friend.”

“Excellent,” says Matty, tucking into his fried egg and pouring extra vinegar on his chips. “Hear that, Vince? I’m going to be Danny’s new best friend after you’ve had your coma.”

“Ain’t never gonna happen,” says Vince, reaching over and nicking one of Matty’s sausages.

“Why not?”

“Wouldn’t matter how fucked up I got. I’d always be able to pick Kevin Rowland out of a band lineup.”

“Arse,” says Matty, putting down his fork and pushing his plate away. “That’s just typical of you, Vince. I knew

you’d find a way of stopping me becoming Danny’s best friend.”

We spend the rest of the afternoon rehearsing and arguing about the running order of the set list and (as is the way of things) hanging out with Vince and Matty for a few hours cheers me right up. I’ve decided not to worry about Didier any more. I’ve decided not to worry about Alison’s mystery timetable. I’ve decided not to think about Saab convertibles and ways of saving people from the death penalty and methods of turning myself into Ruth’s partner Bob.

I’ll give the band everything I’ve got for the rest of this year and worry about the consequences later. If we fail, I’ll find myself a half-decent job and get on with it. If we make it, Alison will regain her respect for me overnight. It’s going to be OK. There’s only two weeks left until the first gig and I have a strange feeling that something good is going to come out of it all.

“It’s sounding good, isn’t it, Vince?” I say as we pack up our gear to go home. “Yes, Danny. It is.” “Everything to play for, then?” “Yes, mate,” he says. “Everything to play for.”

These last two weeks have been full of very bad things. My credit card has gone belly up, the shelves I tried to put up in the bathroom have fallen down, my haircut is growing out in what can only be described as a wilfully perverse manner, and I’m badly in need of a decent night’s sleep. It’s Vince’s fault. He’s been phoning me at all hours of the day and night. He’s turned into hyper Vince. He won’t leave me alone. He wants to discuss trousers and set lists and the most direct routing between major British cities, and he especially wants to discuss the collection of top-notch compilation tapes that he’s putting together for the tour.

He’s made a different tape for each journey: tape A (for the drive between London and Wolverhampton), tape B (for the drive between Wolverhampton and Cambridge), tape C (for the drive between Cambridge and Nottingham) and an extra-special tape (tape X) for the journey between Aylesbury city centre and London, Shepherd’s Bush.

He calls me every day. He calls me at home and he calls me at the video shop and yesterday he called me at two o’clock in the morning to ask me which version of “Hard Rain’ I thought he should include on our BirminghamtoBristol tape. He was most put out when I said that I wasn’t all that arsed. He accused me of not giving my full attention to his problems. He accused me of being a closet Roxy Music fan. He said that everyone knows the Dylan version is infinitely superior to the Brian Ferry version, and when I pointed out that if this was the case then why was he phoning me up in the middle of the night to ask which

one to include on the tape, he slammed the phone down in a full-on strop.

It’s difficult to come to terms with: Vince in a state of high excitement, whilst a rare and beautiful thing, is enough to stretch the firmest of friendships to its limits.

It was a similar story when we went shopping for gig clothes in Camden last weekend. Vince was totally on one. He was rushing round the stalls like a bull terrier with worms; picking up flares and Tshirts and armfuls of crushed-velvet trousers, and he wouldn’t take no for an answer when me and Matty refused to crouch down behind the Chinese noodle stand and try them on. He claims that he’s doing us a favour. He claims that he has a duty to share his innate sense of style with lesser mortals like me and Matty. Just because he once got beaten up for wearing a Bri-Nylon blouse in the middle of Leytonstone High Road during his short-lived Morrissey period, he thinks he has a moral obligation to introduce us to our camp sides.

And that’s not even the worst of it. Among other things: Bob has failed to come through with the six tickets to the Monaco Grand Prix that I asked him for; Ike’s tour manager has left a message on my answer phone saying that we might not get any sound checks on this tour; and Rufus beat me at five successive games of chess when I called round to see him yesterday afternoon. He slaughtered me. He saw through my Sicilian defence in two moves. He saw through my Nimzovich opening in one. It’s no good. I’m going to have to buy myself a new book.

The Boy’s Own Annual of Classic Chess Moves that Sheila gave me had half of its pages missing: I probably shouldn’t have tried to make up the rest of the moves on my own.

Still, at least my mum has been looking out for me this week. She’s been most helpful and not at all bordering on mad. How nice of her to start sending me a selection of job applications that she’s clipped out of the local evening paper and underlined with six different colours of felt-tip pen.

Musicians wanted to work on Russian cruise ships.

Must beau fait with Chris De Burgh songs and similar.

Must be comfortable wearing frilly viscose shirt and clip-on bow tie. Must be prepared to service/entertain lonely,

single women of a certain age.

Now booking for summer season.

Ports to include: Helsinki, Vladivostok and a three-night stopover in sunny Murmansk.

Free vodka, prostitutes and as much pickled cabbage as you can eat.

Cheers, Mum. Thanks a lot.

Of course, this all pales into insignificance when you consider what happened to Sheila last weekend. There she was, innocently cleaning some rubbish out of her kitchen cupboards, stretching over to clear a stubborn pile of muffin crumbs from underneath the cooker hood, when all of a sudden her stepladder gave way beneath her and she ended up falling over and damaging her hip. It’s not broken but it still means that she’s going to be laid up for the next couple of weeks or so. I went round to see her the day after she’d done it and she was looking pretty sorry for herself.

“How stupid of me, Daniel,” she said, sitting up in bed and tucking into the packet of Eccles cakes that I’d brought her. “You see, I still think I can do all those tricky little things like climbing up ladders and cleaning out the kitchen cupboards and I can’t.”

“You should have called me,” I said. “I would have come over and helped you.”

“Yes, well, I would have, Daniel, but I don’t like to bother you too often if I can help it.”

“Why not?”

“It makes me cross.”

“Cross? Why does it make you cross?”

“Having to ask for people’s help all the time. You don’t know what it’s like. You’re much too young to understand.”

“No, Sheila,” I said, helping myself to a biscuit, “I think I know what you mean.”

“I’m sorry, Daniel,” she said firmly, ‘but I don’t really think that you do.”

She was right, of course.

We ended up having a really nice afternoon. I told Sheila all about my concerns over Alison’s mystery timetable and Sheila told me all about her obsession with martial-arts movies and the years she spent living in the Far East. It turns out Sheila has had an amazing life. She’s lived all over the world: India, China, Malaysia and Japan, and she spent ten years running an English-language school with her husband in Hong Kong after the war.

“Of course, we didn’t make very much money, Daniel, but it really was a lovely way to live. We saw so many interesting things. You see that small vase over there on the mantelpiece? That was given to me by the son of a Mongolian warlord.”

“Wow,” I say, going over to the fireplace to take a closer look. “It’s beautiful, Sheila.”

“Yes, it is. I received quite a lot of presents when I was teaching. I dare say I was something of a catch in those days. If I hadn’t been happily married…”

“You might have run off with the son of a Mongolian warlord?”

“Well…” She laughs, forcing some colour back into her parched cheeks. “You never know.”

“I’m a bit jealous, Sheila,” I say, helping myself to a fondant fancy and watching her bony fingers struggle with her hot teacup.

“Are you, my dear? What on earth for?”

“Well, because you’ve really lived, Sheila.”

“Of course I have, Daniel. What else is life for?”

She seemed a little better the last couple of times I saw her. Her daughter is coming up from Cornwall to look after her this weekend, and with a bit of luck she’ll be up and about before we head off for our first gig in Wolverhampton on Monday. It makes you wonder, though. I mean, who would have thought it? She speaks five different languages (including Mandarin), she’s lived in ten different countries (including Tibet), she’s had fifteen proposals of marriage (including one from a genuine Mongolian warlord) and she still gets ignored at the supermarket checkout when she’s queuing up to pay for her tinned sardines. Maybe I should see if Alison fancies setting up a language school in Tibet. Maybe I should be looking to Sheila as an example of how to live my life instead of wondering about ways to turn myself into Ruth’s partner Bob.

Maybe I should have one more go at trying to make myself rich and famous before I think about applying for a job on a Russian cruise ship.

“Danny, it’s me.”

“Hey, I’m glad it’s you. There’s something important that I need to ask you about.”

“Really?”

“Yes. Now, given the choice, would you rather live in Tibet or Murmansk?”

“Urn… neither, really.”

“Come on, if you had to choose?”

“Well… Tibet, I guess.”

“Good. I was hoping you’d say that. Vince reckoned Murmansk but he was only saying that to be perverse.”

“Danny, listen, I’ve got something to tell you.”

My heart misses a beat. I hate it when people say that. It’s always bad news. It can only mean one of two things: a) she’s

decided to leave me or b) she’s just found out that she’s got a brain tumour.

“What is it?” I say, opting for brain tumour option over the leaving me option. “You’re not ill or anything, are you?”

“No, it’s nothing like that.”

“Shit… what is it, then… ?”

“It’s about this weekend. I’ve got to work. I won’t be able to make it back to London before you go away.”

“You’re kidding?” I say, half relieved about the brain tumour leaving me news and half put out that she won’t be coming home to see me off.

“No,” she says softly. “I can’t help it, Danny, they want me to put in a couple of extra days on this project that I’m doing. We’ve got a presentation that needs finalising by Monday morning and I can’t really say no.”