Half-truths & White Lies (10 page)

I recognized Tom Fellows as the threat that he was the
second I introduced him to Laura Albury. By that time,
our friendship had survived a four-year separation,
working together and the odd admission uttered under
the influence of alcohol, which she had graciously
chosen to ignore. The change in her was so immediate
that I felt I had no choice but to walk away. I even
thought about leaving town and putting down roots
elsewhere. I had not counted on being charmed by Tom
Fellows or the fact that, in time, his friendship would
become as important to me as Laura's.

In my early twenties I was the embodiment of everything
that was sensible and respectable. I had turned
into the professional suit-wearer that my parents had
hoped I would become.

'Get a few years under your belt, son,' my father
advised me, man to man. 'Thirty is the right age for a
man to marry. Plenty of time to shop around.'

I was still young enough for thirty to sound old. I
enjoyed work to a degree, I even enjoyed playing the
part, but was this really all there was to life: university,
job, marriage, children?

You have no idea how attractive Tom's lifestyle was to
me. There was no rigid timescale to anything he did.
Against the background of our nine-to-five working
lives, his pressures were relatively few. He was the front
man and driving force behind the Spearheads, a rock
band who had achieved local success and were aiming
for the big time.

'Enjoy the ride, boys,' he would say. 'It's only a matter
of time.'

His belief that they were going to break through was
so strong that he had us all convinced. He made only a
small amount of money from gigging. Whatever else
Tom needed, he made by what he casually referred to as
'making himself useful'. There is no doubt that Tom had
an almost extraordinary talent for understanding how
things work. Cars came second only to music in his life.
He invested the little money that he managed to save in
clapped-out shells that looked fit for the scrap heap, but
he stripped them down, lovingly welded them back
together, sprayed and polished them, and sold them on.
I watched him perform these miracles in the double
garage at the bottom of his mother's garden. He
breathed life into them in the same way that
he breathed life into a song. Even as a mechanic, he was
an artist. Although he paid his way at home with the
vehicle-restoration work, he could never really charge
enough to represent the hours that he put in, so he also
took on extra work. He gained himself a reputation as
someone who could be trusted to do a good job,
whether it was car repairs, gardening or small building
jobs. When you weren't sure whom to call, you called
Tom. If he had been aware of his own worth or if he had
become qualified in any of the areas that he already
excelled in, he could have made a grand living. As it
was, he felt he had to be the cheap option for people
who couldn't afford – or couldn't afford to be ripped off
by – the so-called professionals. Unemployment was at
an all time high in the 1970s.

'Settle up with me when you can afford it,' he would
say, not wanting to cause offence.

The businessman in me was appalled. 'You've just
done a day's work for nothing!'

'I went to school with his Jimmy.' He scrubbed at his
hands until he felt they were clean enough to handle a
guitar. 'They didn't have much then, and that was when
he was in work, but he would always make sure that he
took me to the game if we were playing at home. My
dad didn't bother sticking around long enough to do
that.'

'What about the materials?'

He shrugged and pointed to a wooden tea chest.
'Spares. When someone can afford a new part, I recondition
the old ones. You never know when they
might come in handy.'

'How do you make ends meet?'

'My mum has never let me starve. Pete, you give a
little, you take a little.' He put one hand on my shoulder
and looked at me as if I was the one who didn't
understand how the world worked. 'You know that
shipment of tyres I've got stacked out the front?'

'Yes?'

'Do you think I did that all myself? Who do you think
helped me unload them?'

'I did wonder.'

'And no one's complained. Do you see anyone else
getting away with that?'

In other words, despite the bad-boy image, he was as
hard-working and genuine a soul as you could hope to
meet. There wouldn't be a single complaint from neighbours
if he made a racket on a Saturday morning
revving up a car in the road. He was far more likely to
receive offers of help. The only person he failed to
charm instantly was Laura's mother, but she was a hard
nut to crack.

I would never have been able to hate Tom Fellows, or
to convince myself that he wasn't good enough for
Laura. The story of how he came to be stifled by an
office job is a tragedy. It is also the story that I need to
find a way to tell Andrea, because it is really her story.

Tom passed the good-boyfriend test with flying
colours. For once, there was no need for Laura to introduce
me or to explain who I was. He not only
recognized the importance of our history, he knew that
it was vital to the success of his relationship with Laura.
The need to rehearse with the Spearheads in the
evenings and his irregular hours meant that dates were
going to be few and far between. We were always
welcome to watch the practice sessions or gigs, but for
every really exciting rehearsal where you felt that you
were watching the creation of something important,
there were ten when someone couldn't get a chord
sequence quite right and they had to go over it again
and again. Tom was a hard taskmaster. He demanded
commitment and something close to perfection. If
Laura had thought that going out with someone in a
band was going to be glamorous, she was sorely
mistaken.

'I'm bored!' Laura shouted to me, trying to make herself
heard above the din.

I shook my head, putting a hand behind each ear.
'Can't hear you!'

The chords stopped suddenly, leaving the sound of
Laura yelling 'Bored' hanging in the air. The band all
turned and stared, and we hung our heads like naughty
school children.

'Sorry, guys,' I tried to explain. 'We're going to go now.'
We stood and shuffled backwards towards the door.
'Maybe see you in the pub for last orders?'

Laura waved and I closed the door behind her.
Outside, we fell against the wall of the garage laughing
as the music started to vibrate again.

Laura was aware that her mother was going to judge
Tom on his appearance. While he was keen to meet her
family, she was happy to delay this until it was
absolutely necessary. The only thing on the plus side for
her was that Tom could rarely pick her up or take her
home. That was always my job.

Over the next eighteen months there was a shift in the
balance of our relationship. I found myself wanting to
spend time with Tom as much as with Laura. It started
with an invitation to come and see his latest acquisition
in his workshop. He had come across a 1956 MGA at an
auction, an absolute bargain.

'She's a beauty.' He smiled knowingly. 'I can't wait to
hear what you think of her.'

Why he should have wanted my opinion I will never
know. What I saw was a rusting shell propped up on
bricks where its wheels should have been.

'Well?' he asked, running a hand over the rear wheel
arch, taking in the whole of the curve. 'What do you think?'

'Wow.' I raised my eyebrows, trying to share his
enthusiasm. Not knowing what else there was to say.

'She was a steal,' he went on. 'You know what people
lack, Pete? Vision! Imagination! That's why treasures
like this end up on the scrap heap.'

I nodded. As far as I was concerned, I was one of
those people.

'They see something to be cast aside, ignoring the
quality of the build. You know what this was? The first
of the modern sporting MGs. The first one without
running boards. When this came out, it looked so far
ahead of its time that everyone wanted a piece of the
action. Take a look under the bonnet,' he encouraged.
'Help yourself.'

I toyed with the catch clumsily, and rattled around
until I felt movement, then I propped it open. 'What's
the size of this thing?' I asked, pretending that I knew
what I was looking at.

'Sixteen hundred, push-rod engine. I'm going to make
her purr again.'

Although the three of us still spent time together, I
started to spend most of my weekends hanging out in
Tom's workshop tinkering with cars rather than in the
cafés in town with Laura listening to the jukebox.

Tom's mother insisted on calling her garage 'the
shed', but it was so much more than that. By day it was
where Tom worked on his cars and gadgets, by night it
was a rehearsal studio. Tom was surprisingly – even
obsessively – tidy, and every possible corner and recess
was shelved or stacked high, leaving room for his workbenches,
the Spearheads' van and whatever vehicle Tom
was working on, the band's equipment and a tatty but
comfortable sofa that Tom had rescued. To the
untrained eye, it might have appeared cluttered and
chaotic, but there was a designated place for everything
and heaven help you if you were the person responsible
for putting something back in the wrong place.

As the houses were terraced, access for vehicles was
via an unmade road that was little more than a mud
track running behind the gardens. We rarely bothered
knocking at the front door, but went straight to the
garage, which was generally where Tom could be found
at all hours. Mrs Fellows was friendly enough, and any
friend of her son's was always welcome, but it seemed a
terrible imposition. The double doors at the back were
heavily padlocked, but the favoured few were given
spare keys to the side door. Tom's workshop offered
more privacy and freedom than I could have found
anywhere else at that point in my life. I could forget
about the starchiness of the office and the oppressiveness
of home where laughter sounded out of place. Tom
shared with me the music that had influenced him, the
same tracks that he had taught himself to strum along
with in his bedroom as a teenager. Unlike him, I hadn't
been brought up on a diet of music. I enjoyed it as background
noise, but it was hardly my reason for being.

My father hadn't been a music lover; in fact the
opposite was true. Most of the music that I had been
exposed to was classical or church music, although as a
rule my parents were far more likely to listen to news
and discussion programmes. My father would have considered
listening to music a frivolous pastime that did
not fully occupy either the mind or the hands, leaving
one exposed to all manner of evil. When he was out, my
mother would sometimes allow me to listen to Flanders
and Swann by way of light relief. For those of you who
are not familiar with their work, I can only describe
them as a musical comedy duo, who performed at a
grand piano wearing black tie. They followed the great
and very British tradition of word play. I understood
little of the meaning of the lyrics, but as a child I
enjoyed the sound of the language, especially the songs
with animal noises, 'I'm a Gnu' and 'The
Hippopotamus Song' being particular favourites. By the
age of twelve, I had learned most of
At the Drop of a Hat
by heart. However, the Stones they were not. It wasn't
possible to impress school friends by knowing all of the
words to 'The Reluctant Cannibal'.

Tom decided that he was responsible for my musical
education and he wanted me to understand what I was
listening to. It was a lesson in history.

'Forget Elvis,' he said. 'We start with the blues. That's
where rock and roll began.'

His prescription for musical ignorance was a cocktail
of Robert Johnson, Sonny Boy Williamson, Blind Willie
Johnson and Howlin' Wolf. Raw recordings, all of them,
with hints of long dusty journeys, smoke-filled bars, the
comfort of steamy nights to alleviate the general sense
of hopelessness, and something else so new to me that
I didn't have the vocabulary to put into words.

'What do you think?' Tom asked.

I was more comfortable making a joke of it so I sang
my reply, something of a musical cliché, 'Diddly-diddly-diddly-di, Da-da-da!'

He was disappointed in me. 'Well, I suppose that's
something. At least you know that Status Quo didn't
invent the twelve-bar blues riff. Now we're going to
throw you in at the deep end.'

I wasn't prepared for the confusion of 'Tomorrow
Never Knows' by the Beatles or the challenging rhythms
of
Led Zeppelin III
. Sitting opposite Tom as he strummed
along with his eyes closed, I tried to mimic the movement
of his body as he kept time with the music. He
was mesmerizing, but I found the music difficult and
foreign at first. When the breakthrough finally came, it
was as if I had suddenly grasped the most complicated
mathematical equation you can imagine. A whole new
world opened up for me.

That world included guitar gods: Jimi Hendrix, Eric
Clapton, David Gilmour, Jimmy Page and Brian May.
Great showmen: David Bowie, Marc Bolan, Alice
Cooper, Gary Glitter (what a shock that was), Roy Wood
and the late, great Freddie Mercury. And great, great
songs: 'All The Young Dudes' by Mott the Hoople, 'Walk
on the Wild Side' by Lou Reed, 'See Emily Play' by Pink
Floyd, 'Satisfaction' by the Rolling Stones, 'Virginia
Plain' by Roxy Music. And that was just for starters. I was
a convert, and like most converts I became a fanatic.

It was in Tom's workshop that I learned a few chords
on the guitar and heard some of Tom's fledgling songs
take form. It was there that Tom told me about his plans
for the band over shared cans of beer. I learned how to
use my new camera, making a study of Tom Fellows and
working out the best lighting, the best angle to shoot
him from. Many people blessed with natural talent
cannot understand why mere mortals cannot do as they
do and Tom didn't make the best teacher, but his
enthusiasm was enough to carry you. If I described the
lighting effect I was looking for, he would be able to
create it by setting up the room and making light
reflectors using whatever he could lay his hands on.