High Fidelity (23 page)

LAURA
and I go to see my mum and dad, and it feels sort of official, like we're announcing something. I think that feeling comes from them rather than from us. My mum's wearing a dress, and my dad doesn't buzz around doing things to his stupid and vile homemade wine, and nor does he reach for the TV remote control; he sits down in a chair and listens and asks questions, and in a dim light he would resemble an ordinary human being having a conversation with guests.

It's easier to have parents if you've got a girlfriend. I don't know why this is true, but it is. My mum and dad like me more when I have someone, and they seem more comfortable; it's as if Laura becomes a sort of human microphone, somebody we speak into to make ourselves heard.

“Have you been watching
Inspector Morse?”
Laura asks, apropos of nothing.

“No,” says my dad. “They're repeats, aren't they? We've got them on video from the first time around.” See, this is typical of my dad. It's not enough for him to say that he never watches repeats, that he's the first on the block; he has to add an unnecessary and mendacious embellishment.

“You didn't have a VCR the first time around,” I point out, not unreasonably. My dad pretends he hasn't heard.

“What did you say that for?” I ask him. He winks at Laura, as if she's in on a particularly impenetrable family joke. She smiles back. Whose family is it, anyway?

“You can buy them in the shops,” he says. “Ready-made ones.”

“I know that. But you haven't got any, have you?”

My dad pretends he hasn't heard and, at this point, if it had been just the three of us, we would have had a row. I would have told him that he was mental and/or a liar; my mother would have told me not to make mountains out of molehills, etc., and I would have asked her whether she had to listen to this stuff all day, and we would have taken it on from there.

When Laura's here, though…I wouldn't go so far as to say she actively likes my parents, but she certainly thinks that parents generally are a good thing, and that therefore their little quirks and idiocies are there to be loved, not exposed. She treats my father's fibs and boasts and non sequiturs as waves, giant breakers, and she surfs over them with skill and pleasure.

“They're really expensive, though, aren't they, those ready-made ones?” she says. “I bought Rob a couple of things on video for his birthday a few years ago, and they came to nearly twenty-five pounds!”

This is shameless stuff. She doesn't think twenty-five pounds is a lot of money, but she knows they will, and my mum duly gives a loud, terrified, twenty-five-quid shriek. And then we're off onto the prices of things—chocolates, houses, anything we can think of, really—and my dad's outrageous lies are forgotten.

And while we're washing up, more or less the same thing happens with my mum.

“I'm glad you're back to sort him out,” she says. “God knows what the flat would look like if he had to look after himself.”

This really fucks me off, a) because I'd told her not to mention Laura's recent absence, b) because you don't tell any woman, but especially not Laura, that one of her major talents is looking after me, and c) I'm the tidier one of the two of us, and the flat was actually cleaner during her absence.

“I didn't know you'd been letting yourself in to examine the state of our kitchen, Mum.”

“I don't need to, thanks all the same. I know what you're like.”

“You knew what I was like when I was eighteen. You don't know what I'm like now, bad luck.” Where did that “bad luck”—childish, taunting, petulant—come from? Oh, I know where, really. It came from straight out of 1973.

“He's much tidier than me,” says Laura, simply and gravely. I've heard this sentence about ten times, with exactly the same intonation, ever since I was forced to bring Laura here for the first time.

“Oh, he's a good lad, really. I just wish he'd sort himself out.”

“He will.” And they both look at me fondly. So, yes, I've been rubbished and patronized and worried over, but there's a glow in the kitchen now, genuine three-way affection, where previously there might have been simply mutual antagonism, ending with my mum's tears and me slamming the door. I do prefer it this way, really; I'm happy Laura's here.

FLY
posters. I'm for them. The only creative idea I have ever had in my life was for an exhibition of fly poster photographs. It would take two or three decades to get enough stuff, but it would look really good when it was finished. There are important historical documents on the window of the boarded-up shop opposite mine: posters advertising a Frank Bruno fight, and an Anti-Nazi rally, and the new Prince single, and a West Indian comedian, and loads of gigs, and in a couple of weeks they will be gone, covered over by the shifting sands of time—or at least, an advert for the new U2 album. You get a sense of the spirit of the age, right? (I'll let you into a secret: I actually started on the project. In 1988 I took about three pictures on my Instamatic of an empty shop on the Holloway Road, but then they let the shop, and I kind of lost enthusiasm. The photos came out OK—OKish, anyway—but no one's going to let you exhibit three photos, are they?)

Anyway, every now and then I test myself: I stare at the shopfront to make sure that I've heard of the bands with gigs coming up, but the sad truth is that I'm losing touch. I used to know everyone, every single name, however stupid, whatever the size of the venue the band was playing. And then, three or four years ago, when I stopped devouring every single word in the music papers, I began to notice that I no longer recognized the names playing some of the pubs and smaller clubs; last year, there were a couple of bands playing at the Forum who meant absolutely nothing to me. The Forum! A fifteen-hundred-capacity venue! One thousand five hundred people going to see a band I'd never heard of! The first time it happened I was depressed for the entire evening, probably because I made the mistake of confessing my ignorance to Dick and Barry. (Barry almost exploded with derision; Dick stared into his drink, too embarrassed for me even to meet my eye.)

Anyway, again. I'm doing my spot-check (Prince is there, at least, so I don't score
nul points—
one day I'm going to score
nul points,
and then I'll hang myself) and I notice a familiar-looking poster. “
BY POPULAR DEMAND
!” it says. “
THE RETURN OF THE GROUCHO CLUB
!” And then, underneath, “
EVERY FRIDAY FROM
20
TH JULY
,
THE DOG AND PHEASANT
.” I stand there looking at it for ages, with my mouth open. It's the same size and color as ours used to be, and they've even had the cheek to copy our design and our logo—the Groucho Marx glasses and moustache in the second “o” of “Groucho,” and the cigar coming out of the bumcrack (that's probably not the correct technical term, but that's what we used to call it) in the “b” at the end of “club.”

On our old posters, there used to be a line at the bottom listing the type of music I played; I used to stick the name of the brilliant, gifted DJ at the end, in the doomed hope of creating a cult following for him. You can't see the bottom of this one because some band has plastered a load of little flyers over it; so I peel them off, and there it is: “
STAX ATLANTIC MOTOWN R
&
B SKA MERSEYBEAT AND THE OCCASIONAL MADONNA SINGLE
—
DANCE MUSIC FOR OLD PEOPLE
—
DJ ROB FLEMING
.” It's nice to see I'm still doing it after all these years.

What's going on? There are only three possibilities, really: (a) this poster has been there since 1986, and fly poster archaeologists have just discovered it; (b) I decided to restart the club, got the posters done, put them up, and then suffered a pretty comprehensive attack of amnesia; (c) someone else has decided to restart the club for me. I reckon that explanation “c” is the best bet, and go home to wait for Laura.

 

“It's a late birthday present. I had the idea when I was living with Ray, and it was such a good one that I was really annoyed that we weren't together anymore. Maybe that's why I came back. Are you pleased?” she says. She's been out with a couple of people for a drink after work, and she's a bit squiffy.

I hadn't thought about it before, but I am pleased. Nervous and daunted—all those records to dig out, all that equipment to get hold of—but pleased. Thrilled, really.

“You had no right,” I tell her. “Supposing…” What? “Supposing I was doing something that couldn't be canceled?”

“What do you ever do that can't be canceled?”

“That's not the point.” I don't know why I have to be like this, all stern and sulky and what-business-is-it-of-yours. I should be bursting into tears of love and gratitude, not sulking.

She sighs, slumps back on the sofa, and kicks her shoes off.

“Well, tough. You're doing it.”

“Maybe.”

One day, when something like this happens, I'm just going to go, thanks, that's great, how thoughtful, I'm really looking forward to it. Not yet, though.

 

“You know we're doing a set in the middle?” says Barry.

“Like fuck you are.”

“Laura said we could. If I helped out with the posters and all that.”

“Jesus. You're not going to take her up on it?”

“'Course we are.”

“I'll give you ten percent of the door if you don't play.”

“We're getting that anyway.”

“What's she fucking playing at? OK, twenty percent.”

“No. We need the gig.”

“One hundred and ten percent. That's my final offer.”

He laughs.

“I'm not kidding. If we get one hundred people paying a fiver a throw, I'll give you five hundred and fifty pounds. That's how much it means to me not to hear you play.”

“We're not as bad as you think, Rob.”

“You couldn't be. Look, Barry. There's going to be people from Laura's work there, people who own dogs and babies and Tina Turner albums. How are you going to cope with them?”

“How are they going to cope with us, more like. We're not called Barrytown anymore, by the way. They got sick of the Barry/Barrytown thing. We're called SDM. Sonic Death Monkey.”

“‘Sonic Death Monkey.'”

“What do you think? Dick likes it.”

“Barry, you're over thirty years old. You owe it to yourself and to your friends and to your mum and dad not to sing in a group called Sonic Death Monkey.”

“I owe it to myself to go out on the edge, Rob, and this group really does go out on the edge. Over it, in fact.”

“You'll be going fucking right over it if you come anywhere near me next Friday night.”

“That's what we want. Reaction. And if Laura's bourgeois lawyer friends can't take it, then fuck 'em. Let 'em riot, we can handle it. We'll be ready.” He gives what he fondly imagines to be a demonic, drug-crazed chuckle.

 

Some people would relish all this. They'd make an anecdote out of it, they'd be getting the phrasing right in their heads even as the pub was being torn apart, even as weeping lawyers with bleeding eardrums were heading for the exits. I am not one of those people. I just gather it all up into a hard ball of nervous anxiety and put it in my gut, somewhere between the belly button and the arsehole, for safe keeping. Even Laura doesn't seem to be that worried.

“It's only the first one. And I've told them they can't go on for longer than half an hour. And OK, you might lose a couple of my friends, but they won't be able to get baby-sitters every week, anyway.”

“I've got to pay a deposit, you know. As well as the rental on the room.”

“That's all taken care of.”

And just that one little sentence sets something off in me. I suddenly feel choked up. It's not the money, it's the way she's thought of everything: one morning I woke up to find her going through my singles, pulling out things that she remembered me playing and putting them into the little carrying cases that I used to use and put away in a cupboard somewhere years ago. She knew I needed a kick up the backside. She also knew how happy I was when I used to do this; and from whichever angle I examine it, it still looks as though she's done it because she loves me.

I cave in to something that has been eating away at me for a while, and put my arms around her.

“I'm sorry I've been a bit of a jerk. I do appreciate what you've done for me, and I know you've done it for the best possible reasons, and I do love you, even though I act as though I don't.”

“That's OK. You seem so cross all the time, though.”

“I know. I don't get myself.”

But if I had to take a wild guess, I'd say that I'm cross because I know I'm stuck, and I don't like it. It would be nicer, in some ways, if I wasn't so bound to her; it would be nicer if those sweet possibilities, that dreamy anticipation you have when you're fifteen or twenty or twenty-five, even, and you know that the most perfect person in the world might walk into your shop or office or friend's party at any moment…it would be nicer if all that were still around somewhere, in a back pocket or a bottom drawer. But it's all gone, I think, and that's enough to make anyone cross. Laura is who I am now, and it's no good pretending otherwise.

I MEET
Caroline when she comes to interview me for her newspaper, and I fall for her straightaway, no messing, while she's at the bar in the pub waiting to buy me a drink. It's a hot day, the first of the year—we go and sit at a trestle table outside and watch the traffic—and she's pink cheeked and wearing a sleeveless, shapeless summer dress with clumpy boots, and for some reason the outfit looks really good on her. But I think I would have gone for anyone today. The weather makes me feel as though I've lost all the dead nerve-ends that were stopping me from feeling and, anyway, how can you fail to fall in love with someone who wants to interview you for a newspaper?

She writes for the
Tufnell Parker,
one of those free magazines full of advertisements that people shove through your door and you shove into the rubbish bin. Actually, she's a student—she's doing a journalism course, and she's on work experience. And, actually, she says her editor isn't sure whether he'll want the piece, because he's never heard of the shop or the club, and Holloway is right on the borderline of his parish, or constituency, or catchment area, or whatever it is. But Caroline used to come to the club in the old days, and loved it, and wanted to give us a plug.

“I shouldn't have let you in,” I say. “You must only have been about sixteen.”

“Dear me,” she says, and I can't see why until I think about what I've just said. I didn't mean it as a pathetic chat-up line, or indeed any sort of a chat-up line; I just meant that if she's a student now, she must have been at school then, even though she looks as though she's in her late twenties or early thirties. When I find out that she's a mature student and she worked as a secretary for some left-wing publishing company, I try to correct the impression I must have given without whiting it out altogether, if you see what I mean, and I make a bit of a hash of it.

“When I said that thing about not letting you in, I didn't mean you look young. You don't.” Jesus. “You don't look old, either. You just look as old as you are.” Fucking hell. What if she's forty-five? “Well, you do. A bit younger, maybe, but not a lot. Not too much. Just right. I'd forgotten about mature students, you see.” I'd rather be a smoothy slimeball than a blundering, semi-coherent, gushing twit any day of the week.

Within minutes, however, I'm looking back fondly on those gushing twit days; they seem infinitely preferable to my next incarnation, Sleaze Man.

“You must have an enormous record collection,” Caroline says.

“Yeah,” I say. “Do you want to come round and see it?”

I meant it! I meant it! I thought maybe they'd want a picture of me standing by it or something! But when Caroline looks at me over the top of her sunglasses, I rewind and listen to what I said, and let out an audible groan of despair. At least that makes her laugh.

“I'm not usually like this, honest.”

“Don't worry. I don't think he'll let me do one of those
Guardian-
type profiles, anyway.”

“That wasn't why I was worried.”

“It's OK, really.”

It's all forgotten, though, with her next question. All my life I have been waiting for this moment, and when it comes I can hardly believe it: I feel unprepared, caught short.

“What are your five favorite records of all time?” she says.

“Pardon?”

“What are your all-time top five records? Your desert island discs, minus—how many? Three?”

“Minus three what?”

“It's eight on
Desert Island Discs,
isn't it? So eight minus five is three, right?”

“Yeah. Plus three, though. Not minus three.”

“No, I just said…anyway. Your all-time top five records.”

“What, in the club, or at home?”

“Is there a difference?”

“OF COURSE…” Too shrill. I pretend I've got something in my throat, clear it, and start again. “Well, yeah, a bit. There's my top five dance records of all time, and then there's my top five records of all time. See, one of my favorite-ever records is ‘Sin City' by the Flying Burrito Brothers, but I wouldn't play that at the club. It's a country-rock ballad. Everyone would go home.”

“Never mind. Any five. So four more.”

“What d'you mean, four more?”

“Well, if one of them is this ‘Sin City' thing, that leaves four more.”

“NO!” This time I make no attempt to disguise the panic. “I didn't say it was in my top five! I just said it was one of my favorites! It might turn out to be number six or seven!”

I'm making a bit of a fool of myself, but I can't help it: this is too important, and I've waited for it too long. But where have they gone, all these records I've had in my head for years, just in case Roy Plomley or Michael Parkinson or Sue Lawley or whoever used to do
My Top Twelve
on Radio One contacted me and asked me in as a late and admittedly unknown replacement for someone famous? For some reason I can think of hardly any record at all apart from “Respect,” and that's definitely not my favorite Aretha song.

“Can I go home and work it out and let you know? In a week or so?”

“Look, if you can't think of anything, it doesn't matter. I'll do one. My five favorites from the old Groucho Club or something.”

She'll do one! She'll rob me of my one and only chance to make a list for publication in a magazine! I don't think so!

“Oh, I'm sure I can manage something.”

“A Horse with No Name.” “Beep Beep.” “Ma Baker.” “My Boomerang Won't Come Back.” My head is suddenly flooded with the titles of terrible records, and I'm almost hyperventilating.

“OK, put ‘Sin City' down.” There must be one other good record in the entire history of pop.

“‘Baby Let's Play House'!”

“Who's that by?”

“Elvis Presley.”

“Oh. Of course.”

“And…” Aretha. Think Aretha.

“‘Think' by Aretha. Franklin.”

Boring, but it'll do. Three down. Two left. Come
on,
Rob.

“‘Louie, Louie' by the Kingsmen. ‘Little Red Corvette' by Prince.”

“Fine. That's great.”

“Is that it?”

“Well, I wouldn't mind a quick chat, if you've got time.”

“Sure. But is that it for the list?”

“That's five. Do you want to change anything?”

“Did I say ‘Stir It Up'? Bob Marley?”

“No.”

“I'd better have that in.”

“What do you want to leave out?”

“Prince.”

“No problem.”

“And I'll have ‘Angel' instead of ‘Think.'”

“Right.” She looks at her watch. “I'd better ask you a couple of questions before I get back. Why did you want to start it up again?”

“It was a friend's idea really.” A friend. Pathetic. “She organized it without telling me, as a sort of birthday present. I'd better have a James Brown in there, too, I think. ‘Papa's Got a Brand New Bag.' Instead of the Elvis.”

I watch her carefully while she does the necessary crossing out and writing in.

“Nice friend.”

“Yeah.”

“What's her name?”

“Umm…Laura.”

“Surname?

“Just…Lydon.”

“And that motto, ‘Dance Music for Old People.' Is that yours?”

“Laura's.”

“What does it mean?”

“Look, I'm sorry about this, but I'd like ‘Family Affair' by Sly and the Family Stone in there. Instead of ‘Sin City.'”

She crosses out and scribbles again.

“‘Dance Music for Old People'?”

“Oh, you know…a lot of people aren't too old for clubs, but they're too old for acid jazz and garage and ambient and all that. They want to hear a bit of Motown and vintage funk and Stax and a bit of new stuff and so on all jumbled together, and there's nowhere for them.”

“Fair enough. That'll do me, I think.” She drains her orange juice. “Cheers. I'm looking forward to next Friday. I used to love the music you played.”

“I'll make you a tape, if you want.”

“Would you? Really? I could have my own Groucho Club at home.”

“No problem. I love making tapes.”

I know that I'll do it, tonight, probably, and I also know that when I'm peeling the wrapper off the cassette box and press the pause button, it will feel like a betrayal.

 

“I don't believe it,” says Laura when I tell her about Caroline. “How could you?”

“What?”

“Ever since I've known you you've told me that ‘Let's Get It On' by Marvin Gaye was the greatest record of all time, and now it doesn't even make your top five.”

“Shit. Fuck. Bollocks. I knew I'd…”

“And what happened to Al Green? And the Clash? And Chuck Berry? And that man we had the argument about? Solomon somebody?”

Jesus.

 

I call Caroline the next morning. She's not there. I leave a message. She doesn't call back. I ring again. I leave another message. It's getting kind of embarrassing, but there's no way “Let's Get It On” isn't going in that top five. The third time I try I get through to her, and she sounds embarrassed but apologetic, and when she realizes that I'm only calling to change the list she relaxes.

“OK. Definitive top five. Number one, ‘Let's Get It On,' by Marvin Gaye. Number two, ‘This Is the House That Jack Built,' by Aretha Franklin. Number three, ‘Back in the USA,' by Chuck Berry. Number four, ‘White Man in the Hammersmith Palais,' by the Clash. And the last one, last but not least, ha ha, ‘So Tired of Being Alone,' by Al Green.”

“I can't change it again, you know. That's it.”

“Fine.”

“But I was thinking that maybe it would make sense to do your five favorite club records. The editor likes the story, by the way, the Laura stuff.”

“Oh.”

“Is it possible to get a quick list of floor-fillers off you, or is that too much to ask?”

“No. I know what they are.” I spell it all out for her (although when the article appears it says
“In
the Ghetto,” like the Elvis song, a mistake that Barry pretends is due to my ignorance).

“I've nearly finished your tape.”

“Have you? That's really sweet of you.”

“Shall I send it to you? Or do you fancy a drink?”

“Umm…A drink would be great. I'd like to buy you one to thank you.”

“Great.”

Tapes, eh? They work every time.

 

“Who's it for?” Laura asks when she sees me fiddling around with fades and running orders and levels.

“Oh, just that woman who interviewed me for the free paper. Carol? Caroline? Something like that. She said it would be easier, you know, if she had a feel for the kind of music we play.” But I can't say it without blushing and staring intently at the cassette deck, and I know she doesn't really believe me. She of all people knows what compilation tapes represent.

 

The day before I'm supposed to be meeting Caroline for a drink, I develop all the textbook symptoms of a crush: nervous stomach, long periods spent daydreaming, an inability to remember what she looks like. I can bring back the dress and the boots, and I can see her bangs, but her face is a blank, and I fill it in with some anonymous rent-a-cracker details—pouty red lips, even though it was her well-scrubbed English clever-girl look that attracted me to her in the first place; almond-shaped eyes, even though she was wearing sunglasses most of the time; pale, perfect skin, even though I know she's quite freckly. When I meet her I know there'll be an initial twinge of disappointment—
this
is what all that internal fuss was about?—and then I'll find something to get excited about again: the fact that she's turned up at all, a sexy voice, intelligence, wit, something. And between the second and the third meeting a whole new set of myths will be born.

This time, something different happens, though. It's the daydreaming that does it. I'm doing the usual thing—imagining in tiny detail the entire course of the relationship, from first kiss, to bed, to moving in together, to getting married (in the past I have even organized the track listing of the party tapes), to how pretty she'll look when she's pregnant, to names of children—until suddenly I realize that there's nothing left to actually, like,
happen.
I've done it all, lived through the whole relationship in my head. I've watched the film on fast-forward; I know the whole plot, the ending, all the good bit. Now I've got to rewind and watch it all over again in real time, and where's the fun in that?

And fucking…when's it all going to fucking stop? I'm going to jump from rock to rock for the rest of my life until there aren't any rocks left? I'm going to run each time I get itchy feet? Because I get them about once a quarter, along with the utilities bills. More than that, even, during British Summer Time. I've been thinking with my guts since I was fourteen years old, and frankly speaking, between you and me, I have come to the conclusion that my guts have shit for brains.

I know what's wrong with Laura. What's wrong with Laura is that I'll never see her for the first or second or third time again. I'll never spend two or three days in a sweat trying to remember what she looks like, never again will I get to a pub half an hour early to meet her, staring at the same article in a magazine and looking at my watch every thirty seconds, never again will thinking about her set something off in me like “Let's Get It On” sets something off in me. And sure, I love her and like her and have good conversations, nice sex and intense rows with her, and she looks after me and worries about me and arranges the Groucho for me, but what does all that count for, when someone with bare arms, a nice smile, and a pair of Doc Martens comes into the shop and says she wants to interview me? Nothing, that's what, but maybe it should count for a bit more.