Goodnight Steve McQueen (28 page)

I take it all in. I listen to what he’s saying. I wipe the sweat off my neck with a threadbare towel and I sit down and take a long, hot swig of the bourbon. It makes me feel better. It makes me feel like talking. For some reason it makes me tell Vince and Matty all about my abortive day trip to Bruges and the difficulties of spying on people from behind wrought-iron lampposts. Perhaps it was a mistake. It’s all Vince can do to stop himself punching my lights out there and then.

“You toss-wipe,” he says, throwing his towel at the mirror and watching it slide on to the floor. “You wanker, you week-old, unwashed jizz-rag. Why didn’t you go into the restaurant? Why didn’t you let her know you was there? You should have told her you were coming. I told you. Didn’t I?

Didn’t I say that you should have let on to her that you was coming?”

“Yes. You did. I’m an idiot. I shouldn’t have tried to surprise her.”

“Rubbish,” says Vince, tugging on his roll-up. “It weren’t nothing to so with surprising her. The reason you never let on you was coming is because you’re the type of sad bastard who enjoys hiding behind lampposts and spying on your girlfriend. Serves you right.”

“Do you think she’s with him now?” I say, tipping up the bottle of Jack Daniel’s and pouring a trickle of warm alcohol into my mouth.

“Yeah. I do,” says Vince. “I bet she’s fucking him. I bet he’s putting it in her right now. I bet he’s got it—’

“Fuck off, Vince,” I say, standing up and heading towards him with the bottle.

“Well, what d’you expect me to say? I thought we had all this shit worked out before we left. I thought we settled all this over the hummus.”

“Yeah, well, maybe we didn’t.”

Vince pushes his chair to the wall and gets up to meet me. He holds his face centimetres away from mine. I’m not sure which one of us wants to punch the other one more.

“I’m telling you,” he says quietly, ‘you screw this up for me and Matty now and I’ll fucking kill you.”

“I’d like to see you try.”

Shit. That didn’t come out right. That came out all wrong. How come my voice goes all high and shrill like that when I’m angry? How come when Vince gets angry he becomes abnormally centred and composed?

“You and Alison will be all right,” he says, shoving his index finger into my chest. “The two of you will work things out. In the meantime you’ve got a job to do here. If you don’t want to do it, fine, tell me now. Tell me right now and we can all stop wasting each other’s fucking time and go home.”

The don’t want to go home, Vince.”

“Don’t you? Well, I do. I’d love to go home. I’d love to go home right now. I’d like to get back on that motorway, drive all the way back down to London, sit down in my comfy bleedin’ armchair and spend the rest of my life in front of the telly watching mindless, fucked-up rubbish about clitorises and incest, and most of all I’d like to stop driving my useless fucking arse round the length and breadth of the country in a clapped-out kebab van pretending that I’ve still got half a chance in hell of making it.”

“So why the fuck don’t you, then?”

“Because we agreed, Danny,” he says, narrowing his eyes in disgust. “We agreed to give it one last go. We made a deal. It’s up to you now. If you want to call it a day just say so. For once in your sodding life make a fucking decision and stick to it.”

We take a short pause. Vince turns his back on me and pours himself a drink. Matty fiddles with his necklace and scuffs at the floor with his trainer. I try to imagine that my veins are filled with warm milk instead of nitroglycerine.

“OK then,” I say, trying to slow my heart down by taking deep breaths. “You’re right. We’ve got a job to do. Let’s get on with it.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yeah. I’m sure.”

“Right then. That’s it. You’ve made up your mind. I don’t want to hear another fuckin’ word about it.”

It takes a while for both of us to calm down, but after a couple of minutes and half a bottle of Jack Daniel’s I’m almost able to focus my eyes again. Matty is still scuffing the floor. He hates confrontation almost as much as I do, and the pair of us almost coming to blows like this has made him violently uncomfortable. He desperately wants to make things better. He wants to sort things out. I think a small part of him is worried that Vince is going to take a pop at him now that he’s decided not to hit me.

“Hey,” he says, ‘sounds like Scarface have just gone on.” “So what?”

“Well… none of us fancies going to watch them, do we?” “No.” “So?” “So?”

“So why don’t we go off to their dressing room and eat their rider like you said?”

“Nice one. Good idea. I’m starving.” And off we go.

Scarface’s dressing room is ten times the size of ours. It’s got sofas. And a series of anterooms. And a stainless-steel power shower. And a Jacuzzi.

“Where do you think the grub is, then?” says Matty, rubbing his hands together.

“Dunno. Must be through there in one of the other rooms.”

“What do you reckon they’ll have? Do you think they’ll have M&Ms with all the brown ones taken out? Do you think they’ll have quails’ eggs and caviare and slices of arctic roll?”

“No, mate, I don’t. I think they’ll have cheese.”

“Cheese?”

“Yeah. Fifteen different types of cheese.”

It turns out that Scarface are uncommonly keen on cheese. Presumably the catering ladies bring out more food after the band comes off-stage but right now all there is to eat is ten different types of cracker and fifteen different types of cheese.

“Arse. I hate cheese,” says Matty sadly.

“What about Cracker Barrel?” says Vince. “Everyone likes a nice bit of Cracker Barrel.”

“Not me,” says Matty. “I don’t like none of it.”

We work as carefully as we can. We cut the Brie in half and chop bits off the Stilton and Vince digs about in the Bel Paese

with the back of a spoon. Matty has a sniff of the Camembert and says he’s going to be sick.

“It smells like girls’ pants,” he says, turning up his nose and fanning his hand in front of his face.

“How would you know?” says Vince.

“What do you mean, how would I know? I’ve smelt loads of girls’ pants. I lost my virginity when I was thirteen, remember.”

“Yeah, but how many girls have you actually slept with? I mean recently? How many girls have you slept with since you’ve been going out with Kate?”

“None. Woah, what do you mean, Vince? I wouldn’t cheat on Kate. What would I want to cheat on Kate for?”

“It’s your duty,” says Vince, spreading a bit of Dairylea on a cream cracker and swallowing it down in one bite. “You owe it to her to cheat on her.”

“Do I?”

“Yes, you do.”

“Wow. How come?”

“You’re serious about her, right?”

“Yeah, I suppose.”

“Well then, it makes sense that you ought to cheat on her now, before you get married or start living together or having kids or anything like that.”

“Wow. Kids.”

“Exactly.”

“I don’t know, Vince, I’m not really sure.”

“I’m telling you,” Vince says, breaking off a square of feta and popping it into his mouth, ‘now’s the time. Now’s the time to get it out of your system. That way you’ll be more likely to stay faithful to her once you get hitched.”

“You reckon?”

“Yes, mate. I do. Definitely. Sow your oats now and you won’t want to cheat on her later on. She’ll be grateful.”

“Will she?”

“Yeah.”

“She won’t be cross or nothing?”

“No.”

Matty tucks into a buttered water biscuit and mulls this over for a while. I can almost hear his brain ticking over as he thinks.

“Maybe you’re right,” he says, munching distractedly on a slice of Camembert. “Maybe I should try it. I’ve been thinking lately that I ought to start trying more new things.”

“Good thinking, Matty,” says Vince, patting him on the back. “It’s about time you started broadening your horizons a bit.”

“Well… maybe just the one, then. Just to prove to myself how much I love Kate.”

Matty sneaks off to take a piss in Scarface’s Jacuzzi and Vince and I are left alone.

“You bastard,” I say, breaking the silence and attempting to get back on side

“Yeah, well, I ain’t going to force him. I’m just pointing him in the right direction, that’s all.”

“Yeah, but you know what he’s like, he’ll do anything you tell him to. He looks up to you.”

“Does he?”

“Yeah, he does.”

“Well, he shouldn’t,” says Vince miserably.

“Why shouldn’t he?”

“Because I’m a git. I’m a first-degree arse hole with a lousy temper who treats his best mates like shit.”

“I’m sorry about screwing up the gig, Vince,” I say, offering him a swig of my beer.

“Yeah, well,” he says, taking the bottle from me, “I’m sorry things are still dodgy between you and Alison.”

Till get a grip tomorrow, I promise.”

“Yeah, mate,” he says quietly, The too.”

“OK then. Good. No one would even know we’d been here.”

I’m not sure this is entirely true. It looks like Scarface’s cheese plate has been attacked by a troupe of giant mice who’ve just come off a week-long hunger strike. I’m not sure that sticking the Brie back together with a forkful of creamy Philadelphia has really done the job. Sod it. Who cares? It’s been a rough day and none of us can face trawling round the back streets of Wolverhampton looking for cold meat pies and kebabs. It’s time to go. Scarface are midway through their final encore and none of us wants to get caught red handed with a pocketful of cheese.

We head back to the van and load up our gear as quickly as we can. We crack open the remains of the booze, plug one of Vince’s compilation tapes into the cassette player and drive off across town in search of tonight’s luxury B&B. It’s a perfect end to the day: Wolverhampton’s grey concrete skyline slipping away in the distance and “Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want’ by The Smiths oozing out of the speakers just as we hit the ring road.

“I like this song, as it goes,” says Vince thoughtfully. “Yeah,” I say. “I like it too.”

DAY TWO

Drive: Wolverhampton-Cambridge (115 miles)

Venue: Corn Exchange (capacity 1,50O)

Sound check: 6.45-7.15

Doors open: 7.3O

Onstage: 8.00-8.3O

Hotel: To be announced (possibly back of kebab van)

Last night’s B&B was supremely awful. For one thing it was locked up when we got there. We had to ring the bell for ages. We had to bash the knocker and shout through the letterbox and it wasn’t until we started throwing handfuls of grit and garden stones at the top-floor window that anybody bothered to come down to let us in.

The owner looked like a bit of a weirdo. He was wearing paisley pyjamas and velvet leopard-print slippers, and for some reason he had a dirty white bandage wrapped right round the top of his head.

At first I thought he was planning to butcher us with an axe or strangle us with his bandage but it turned out he was quite glad to see us. He showed us to our room and called us his ‘boys’. He wanted to know if we fancied some cocoa, and he was most put out when we told him that we didn’t.

It was quite hard to get rid of him. It was only Vince asking him what time we should come down for breakfast in the morning that made him stop fiddling with his bollocks through the slit in his pyjama pants and get up off Matty’s bed and leave. It was only then that we put down our bags and took stock of the room. The kind of room that’s frequented by

travelling salesman called Warren and middle-aged prostitutes called Keith. The kind of room that has mould on the carpet and damp patches on the ceiling and crusty, yellow cum stains on the sheets.

“Is this what I think it is?” says Matty, pulling back the sheet on the one double bed.

“Jesus, yeah, it is,” says Vince. “Help me get them curtains down. We’ll pull ‘em off the window and sleep on top of them instead.”

And so we did. Me and Vince lying fully clothed on top of the filthy chintz curtains and Matty near naked on a pile of dusty blankets on the floor. I didn’t sleep a wink all night. I was too worried about catching nits. Or VD. Or TH. Or a particularly virulent head cold. It didn’t seem to bother Vince, though. As soon as we switched out the lights he was snoring like a walrus full of fish. And so was Matty. Who also grinds his teeth. Loudly.

Today is going to be a much better day than yesterday. It has to be. No matter that we were forced out of our room at 7.30 this morning by an over-zealous cleaning lady with a yellow feather duster and a mop. No matter that the full English breakfast neglected to include bacon or mushrooms or toast. Or black pudding. At least there was a tasty starter of tinned tomato juice and half a sugared grapefruit. At least Mad Bandage Man only spent twenty minutes asking us how we like our eggs and telling us why he’s never seen the need to leave Wolverhampton. He likes it here. He likes the Midlands. He also likes wearing a bandage on his head to keep out all the microwaves.

I never thought I’d be quite this relieved to see the inside of a mobile kebab van.

Vince has made plans for the rest of the day. He thinks it’s vital to map out our spare time so we don’t get bored. That’s one of the crap things about being in a support band: you get slung out of your bed-and-breakfast at the crack of dawn and you’ve got ten long hours left to kill before you can head up to the next venue and do your sound check.

Vince thinks we should try and make the best of it. He thinks we should take the opportunity to look at some prime English heritage sites as we travel up and down the country, and he’s particularly keen to stop off at Hadrian’s Wall on our way up to Scotland at the weekend. Matty is quite keen to stop off in Ashby de la Zouch. He doesn’t know why. He just likes the sound of it.

The first thing we do is stop off at the nearest service station for a quick wash and brush-up. The B&B showers were freezing cold and carpeted with deep-pile pubic hair, and we all feel much better after we’ve cleaned up in the service station urinals and spent a quality moment perusing the contents of the petrol station shop.

“Wow, look at this,” says Matty excitedly. “Can we buy this?”