How I Left the National Grid (6 page)

‘So what if he sees?’

Theo was mad for it, never cared what people thought.

Simon watched big-haired musos pass in front of the car, before turning to Theo. ‘That’s going to look good in
Smash Hits,
isn’t it Theo? When a reporter asks them, ‘Did you meet any other bands while you were recording,’ and Robert Plant goes ‘No, but a group of dustmen in skin-tight leather were mincing inside when we left’.’

‘It’s the eighties,’ I said. ‘We’re taking over from them.’

I watched as Plant pushed his hands into his leather jacket and made his way to a Mercedes.

‘We can’t hang about in here all day,’ Jack said.

‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘We have got work to do.’

Through the car windscreen we saw Bonny advancing towards us, in a huge fur coat. She opened the door.

‘Get out the car,’ she said. ‘What are you waiting for?’

Simon started to move.

‘We’ve entered the big league now,’ she said, as we unloaded. There was a tremor in her voice. She couldn’t stop grinning. She knew it was
only a matter of time before she became famous herself, now.

Bonny loved moments like this. Lived for them.

It was only when we were inside that I stopped feeling like a joke. I realized something special was about to happen. Standing in that performance space. My lyrics scrawled out in front of me.

A few inches from me, Simon was on his knees, adjusting his bank of pedals. Theo, jumping like a grass hopper, headphones falling off his head. Jack, twirling drum sticks. His left knee bouncing.

I looked round, through the screen separating us from our producer, Vicente.

Exit Discs hadn’t been able to arrange it. It was Bonny who pulled that off. In the last five years Vicente had turned countless amateurs into platinum-selling, critically acclaimed artists. What’s more, he’d agreed to do it for half the price when he heard our demo. Sent a postcard to Bonny with the words, ‘I’m speechless.’

He stood behind the screen in outsized sunglasses, chest hair poking through gold medallions. Bonny behind him, biting her nails.

You realize then that everyone’s looking at you. The vision they’re all wanting to come to life only exists in your head. It’s on that crumpled piece of paper in front of you.

You’ve convinced them you can do it. You can’t screw up.

Vicente came on the intercom. You and him have prepared for this moment for weeks. You’ve stayed up all night in his Kensington mansion, in the kind of house you never knew existed. Trying to work out arrangements for your songs with one finger, on his grand piano in a huge white room. Him standing there with a pair of scissors, shredding your lyrics and rearranging them. Burroughs’ cut-up technique. Rasping, with his weird blend of Italian and Estuary the words, ‘We’ll keep it raw. You’ll all play it live.’

You’ve sat with a Mini-Moog in his front room while his Yugoslavian supermodel wife offers you canapés, your lyrics about a decaying Britain bristling up at you. You’ve talked until the small hours about what this record means to you. How you don’t care about the luxury, how you just want to create the perfect cry for help. You’ve
told him how you feel about Thatcher, about the recession. How angry it makes you. He’s seen the ‘Britain Isn’t Working’ posters and he talks about Mussolini, post-war Italy. He tells you to be careful of your twenties. Tells you they’re a tightrope.

Arriving in the studio, you’ve lain on the sofa in the reception suite, trying to imagine how the record will sound. Bonny’s stood over you, put her hand on your shoulder and told you to make it good. Both of you knowing this is your only chance of making a better life for yourselves.

All of that, leading up to this moment.

Vicente clears his throat. ‘Gentlemen, ‘A State Of Exile’ first,’ he shouts. ‘Four counts, Jack, and we’ll drop you in.’

Simon looks round us all. ‘Right, keep them eyes up lads,’ he says.

Vicente raises a finger. You close your eyes.

A moment later the synths fill your ears. They’re soon pinned back by the opening attack from Jack’s drums, blasting your jeans against your legs. Even with your eyes closed you can still make out Theo’s silhouette. He arches over his bass. Attacking the two-note riff that creates a canvas for Simon.

Vicente is frantically waving from the control booth, motioning to Simon to improvise for a few bars.

Simon doesn’t need prompting. He’s forgotten the plot long ago, and when his plectrum strikes the strings it’s not the soothing cloud you’re all expecting, but a jagged stab of noise. He bends over his guitar, jerking the tremolo arm. Throws his head back. Theo’s knocked sideways as Simon strikes the strings above the nut of the guitar, unleashing a brittle shower of shards. Theo’s bass line then combining with his own, drill-like imitation. Then Simon stamps on a pedal and that familiar sound emerges. He turns to you, one foot on the pedal, and snaps it off.

You open your mouth.

You don’t even need to look at the lyric sheet.

You’re inside the sleek world of paranoia and high rises that you’ve created in your head.

Your voice gives out for the final chorus, but Vicente is still jumping at the end. ‘That was what we needed,’ he shouts.

Bonny comes on the intercom. ‘We happy?’

Jack nods enthusiastically. Theo agrees, glad no one noticed his mistake in the third bridge. Simon looks to you.

‘Rob?’

‘I kept sitting under the note in the chorus,’ you say. ‘Sounded like a flat tyre.’

‘Nah, you didn’t.’

Vicente catches your comment on the intercom. ‘Very well, he says. ‘We’ll go again. Until you happy, Robert.’

Before the track begins again you just catch Bonny whispering in Vicente’s ear. ‘What was wrong with that?’ she asks him.

‘Nothing,’ he says.

3

Sam drove with his body close to the wheel until he found the junction for the A40, gasping open amongst the grey backdrop.

He fiddled with the stereo; irritated that Elsa wasn’t with him to share in this moment. Joy Division’s ‘Disorder’ reverberated around the car’s interior, the hard surfaces of the city replaced now by the hard surfaces of the song.

He knew Elsa’s mind would automatically look for cracks in his story. At that moment he missed the Elsa he had first met.

During his first year in halls Elsa had lived at the end of his corridor. Sam had spent that time feeling intoxicated by the idea that he could become a music journalist. Few people in the halls seemed to share his artistic preoccupations, preferring instead to dress up variously as gladiators, schoolgirls and sperm, for the rag week. The only students who were interested in serious subjects carried around copies of Sartre and pinned up pictures of Bobby Sands in their rooms. But Sam couldn’t bring himself to speak to them.

It was a relief when a girl in the flat opposite invited him and a friend over for a Halloween party. As they both sat amongst the broken fairy lights and charred cupcakes, Sam noticed a girl on the windowsill, her arms around her knees. She had blonde, almost white hair held back by a glittering red clip. Her face was whitened with powder and her eyes blackened, both accentuating her smudged scarlet lipstick. She looked straight at Sam.

During the party everyone delivered fragments of their past as though they were unbearably precious. It seemed to be the only skill people learnt at university, a technique that real life would stifle the use of. An American girl was passionately talking about the effect Kennedy getting shot had on the US. ‘The bullet symbolised a society who will no longer raise celebrities above ideas,’ she said. Elsa took a cap gun from the table and mimed
blowing her head off. She acted out imaginary streams of blood pouring onto the floor.

At the end of the party Sam found himself stooped over her guitar in her kitchen. She made him teach her the chords to David Bowie’s ‘Starman’.

The journey from the ruined kitchen to her bedroom remained smeared in his memory. It seemed inevitable even as it happened, like watching a curious object lap its way to the shore. As she sat opposite him on the bed, under a Marc Bolan poster, she flicked through her journal. His eyes caught mentions of flirtations, sequins, and nightclubs. He wished that he could be sat behind her, feasting on the details. She didn’t meet his eye as she closed the book and put it back in a drawer. In the weeks that followed Sam became familiar with the aching morning light of her bedroom, and the snatched sentiments within that book. One day, she swore, she’d shape them into songs.

A thin sheet of rain peppered the car window, and Sam bolted to attention. He thought how Elsa had changed over the years. In the early days that journal had represented a fertile ground between them, which he had hoped would one day open into an artistic life. Was it his fault that that vision hadn’t ever been realized?

A little further north he signalled off for Knutsford Services, just before the looming J19. He parked outside the Burger King.

Just entering the complex, Sam felt that he had entered the kind of urban wilderness which Wardner had probably vanished into. His songs were full of tower blocks and cityscapes, and Sam had no doubt that he might well have retreated into such a hinterland. At that moment he understood the pull of them too, the dark thrill of leaving your identity at the car and joining the drifting bodies. Surely such abandonment was the first stage in creating a new identity?

He sluiced water across his face in the toilets. His reflection in the mirror was distorted by the warped glass. These places
restyle us, he thought. Wardner could look completely different by now, if he took their lead.

Outside, as he queued at Burger King, a man ordering food at the counter caught Sam’s attention. There was something about his forward lean that evoked Wardner. A chill arose on the back of Sam’s neck and he found himself tensing, waiting furiously for the man to turn.

But the man wouldn’t let Sam see his face. He remained stiffly upright, facing straight ahead, sidestepping once he had his food to a table by the counter, where he kept his back to Sam.

Sam ate his own food with his eyes trained on the man’s back. Why did he remind him of Wardner so much? It can’t be him, Sam thought.

Sam focused on his limp sandwich, and when he rose a few minutes later he was frustrated to see the man had gone. He wiped his mouth, shoved the tray into a rack and made his way back to his car.

He drove out of the car park, easing onto the slip road. He was just looking down the motorway for a gap when a white transit van loomed into his rear view mirror. It was bearing down on him, fast. Sam expected him to brake. But the driver clearly had no intention of slowing. It was going to smash into him. Panicking, Sam released the clutch and pumped the accelerator. His car skidded away. But the van kept coming, and Sam had to speed onto the motorway. But he’d been pushed in front of a huge articulated lorry. It blasted its hooter as it towered over Sam, dwarfing his car as he felt himself disappear under it. Sam floored the accelerator, the car jerking madly to one side. But the lorry driver kept his hooter down, and Sam was barely able to grip the wheel as he tried to get away. Awkwardly, he overtook two cars before slowing, easing onto the hard shoulder and putting his head on the wheel.

It took a very long time for his racing heart to stop. For the dark chill in his veins to settle.

But it wasn’t the near-collision that had started him shaking. When he’d looked in the mirror to catch a glimpse of the van driver, he was sure it was Robert Wardner that was staring back at him.

I charged out of the chair and with one lunge grabbed Cunningham by the neck and pinned him to the wall.

‘Robert,’ Bonny shouted, getting up.

‘You won’t win behaving like this,’ Cunningham said, smiling as he wriggled about. I could feel the muscles tighten in his neck.

‘You southerners love the sound of your own voices don’t you?’ I said, looking into his eyes. ‘But you just can’t tell when enough’s enough.’

‘Rob,’ Bonny repeated, putting her hand on my shoulder. ‘Put him down.’

‘Better do what your babysitter says,’ Cunningham whispered.

After a few more seconds of letting him squirm I released him from my grip, watching him pretend not to be shaken as he waddled back to his chair.

His solicitor went over to check on him. ‘Are you alright?’

Cunningham nodded.

‘So we can add attempted assaulted to the crib sheet then,’ he said.

‘What do expect?’ Bonny snapped. ‘You’re threatening to steal music off four working class men from Manchester, who’ve been busting a gut trying to make a record for you. You expect things not to get nasty?’

‘I expect them to understand that what I say goes.’

‘I know you don’t care what people think of you, Andrew. I can tell that from your waistcoat. But don’t you think you could offer a little leeway? You’ve driven them to this point.’

We’d been deadlocked with the label for months. The clever dicks had decided that today’s negotiations should ideally take place in an airless boardroom, until everyone was so knackered they could barely breathe. All I could hear was overhead fans, distant lifts.

All eyes were on me as I moved back to my seat at the end of the table. Simon was next to me, head in his hands. Next to us was our
lawyer, who seemed to have done nothing but tot up numbers and what have you. Probably calculating what we owed him, again and again. Reckon he was just running down the clock.

At the other end of the table was Andrew Cunningham, head of the label. A bloated man with a thatch of grey hair, his belly spewing over his large-buckled belt. Bonny once described him as ‘Perfect for the eighties, because if he was only more concerned with himself he’d grow a shell.’ I’d soon learnt that the chief weapon in his armoury was pretending we weren’t getting to him. It drove me to new heights of anger. His solicitor sat on his left, looking portly and smug as a grocer surveying a fresh table of produce.