Nico (6 page)

She sat at the harmonium. The instrument was nothing like a church harmonium – much smaller, about the size of a baby's coffin. To create a sound, she had to work the small bellows by way of pedals at her feet. With her right hand she played a repeated single phrase and with her left a melody. She'd carefully created her own harmonies, though she had no idea what the notes were in orthodox musical language.

And then of course, there was the voice. Dungeon-deep, where the secret horrors were hidden. It made you listen. No small achievement these days. Sometimes the words were nonsense, her own made-up juxtaposition of rhymes or words that just sounded intriguing coupled together. ‘Nemesis on loaded wheels.' It made you wonder who was at the flight deck. It certainly wasn't the voice of a sixties chick in op-art pants, or some emotionally neutral piece of Manhattan window-dressing as had been envisaged by the Factory Funsters.

‘This is the voice of one of those neolithic Venuses with the enormous pelvic girdles, and tiny mammalian heads that they dig up from the peat bogs of northern Denmark,' opined Demetrius.

Demetrius's mouth hung open. His glasses were filled with the beatific blue light that emanated from the stage.

Unwed virgins in the land

Tied up on the sand.

Something stirred inside Demetrius's overcoat.

Are you not on the secret side?

Nico muttered off-mike into the wings. Pasquale appeared with a drink and placed it precariously on a corner of the harmonium. She shook her head and put it securely on the floor by her foot pedals. She started up the harmonium again. Maybe for her it was just that bit more interesting than a pedalo, but we were seeing it for the first time. It was a crazy act. A forty-two-year-old Valkyrie, spaced out in motorbike boots.

She stopped pedalling for a second, reached down for her drink and took a long, throat-saving swig. Instantly she spat out the sickly sweet guck and half-puked an enormous arc that cascaded through the spotlight beam.

It echoed on and on through the sound system from one speaker to another. Laughter in the cathedral.

‘I'm going to fire you aaaall … Assholes!' She was sitting in Demetrius's seat in the bus back to the hotel. ‘You're a bunch of rejects.' She went round each one of us. ‘Invalids … freeee-loaders … nymphomaniacs … morons … shysters … Don't
bother turning up for the next show … I'll have you all thrown out!'

‘So … this is the predicament …'

We were gathered around the four-poster bed in Dr Demetrius's Bridal Suite, minus the bride.

‘She's out of stuff already, hence the tantrum … although I must say, I find it unlikely that even Nico with her legendary appetite for self-destruction could possibly have cleaned up four grams in two days. I feel she must have had a little chivalrous assistance on the way.' He sneered at Echo. ‘As for the sackings,
I
determine who stays and who goes … however, I'm afraid there will have to be a certain stringency regarding your immediate remuneration. I can't get another lira out of the Eyeties until we've done a few more shows. There's no recourse but to use what little cash we have in order to keep Nico pointing upwards –'

‘'Old on a minute,' interrupted Echo, 'oo's payin' fer
this
gaff?' He scanned the Bridal Suite.

Demetrius propped himself up on a pink satin cushion. ‘I have certain personal,
private
funds at my disposal, but these are exclusively for my own use in an Absolute Emergency. This does not constitute an emergency, but rather a tiresome interruption in our joyous progress towards the golden South … much in the manner of Keats and Shelley, wouldn't you say, Echo?'

‘What about the beers?' asked Toby.

‘“With beaded bubbles winking at the brim”,' continued Demetrius abstractedly. ‘Perhaps something could be arranged with regard to the refreshments, we shall have to see … In the meantime, frugality, my friends, frugality.' He pulled a tasselled rope and the heavy velvet drapes fell round the four-poster bed.

I had regular sleeping habits, as did Nico, who preferred to sleep all day, fearing disintegration in daylight. I wanted to sleep but couldn't. Italy was out there – the bars, the bamboozle, the eternal city of flirts, but I felt distanced and disorientated … and tired.

In truth Italy was as far away as it had been back in Echo's parlour. What we were up to wasn't work exactly, but it wasn't a holiday either. As Echo said, it was what you did when you couldn't do anything else.

I couldn't seem to connect on any level with Nico. I was used to people who talked. Too much chat seemed to irritate her, too much silence made me nervous. I asked her if she wanted to go and see some frescoes. ‘I can see them in a book.' A stroll maybe? Too far, too tired – the shows exhausted her.

People would give her things. Once, as we were leaving the hotel, a strange girl, emaciated and stricken, pressed a shell into her hand. Nico immediately passed it on to Echo who made the sign of the cross and threw it away. The girl, in Nico's eyes a witch, had been waiting up all night since the show, hanging around the entrance, hoping for a glimpse. ‘Anyone who wants to see me that bad has got to be nuts.'

Nico seemed to keep going on a diet of chocolate and white wine. Demetrius would organise great feasts in an attempt at international conjugality. Nico would absent herself.

‘I can't bear to think of all those lumps of food just
rotting
inside me.'

She said she hadn't had a shit in a couple of weeks. Echo said constipation was routine for a junkie. (Though he wasn't sure if, in his case, it was the smack as he could only go in his own ‘po'.) I imagined Nico, once the gig was done, back at the hotel, curtains drawn, only the ghost flicker of TV, needle emptied, bathroom black, concentrated upon that still stubborn sphincter. Ole Dead Eye in the darkness, coldly staring at the stagnant latrine of romance, the Mediterranean.

Northern Europeans go to Italy to relax, to feel human again in a more exuberant and demonstrative culture, more loving and maternal than their own. North of the Alps it's the fight to stay warm. Nico had devised her own form of insulation – psychical and physical. (I noticed that even on cold days she'd often worn only a light shirt.) But when the smack ran out she soon got the shivers. It didn't matter in the least that we were beside the golden Mediterranean. Nothing outside really impinged on her terrifying single-mindedness, her obsessive neurological and emotional need for heroin. Even
La Dolce Vita
turned sour.

In Rome Nico got deep into withdrawal, her nerves scraping her bones. The money had shrunk, the shows were disappointing, the desperados were doing the drugs in very quickly. The promoters had arranged a lunch meeting with Italian
Vogue
for a possible photo session. Raincoat and Toby practised sucking in their cheeks. The pretty boys and girls dressed in their relaxed classics did not take immediately to Nico wrapped in an old blanket, eyes streaming, concerned only with her fee. I had an idea. Nico upholstered in Renaissance velvet, the needle scars on her tortured hands and arms, the grey flesh hanging lifelessly from those once unassailably high cheekbones. A powerful spread? There was some rapid consultation during which I heard the word ‘
pervertito
', then they shook our hands, wished us a successful tour and left. Within seconds I'd blown everyone's chance of a good lunch.

I felt especially ostracised after that until near the end of the tour in Genova, when I got my big break to go and get the drugs with Echo. (As I knew three Italian words,
Ciao, Vaffanculo
and
Arrivederci
, I had a use.) A smooth transaction with some charming Moroccans, marred only by the later discovery that they'd substituted the heroin with salt.

‘A hundred bucks an' not even enough salt for a packet o' staffords,' lamented Echo.

Nico's reaction was less circumspect. ‘Assholes.'

Things always ended up there.

A heavy black brogue inserted itself into my room – followed by a dark overcoat, beard, glasses, the soft pale skin of one who toileth not in the fields, hummingbird flash of Vick inhaler.

‘James … I feel I must speak to you.'

I thought, This is it. My old pal Dr Demetrius come to administer the last rites.

‘I wonder if you're altogether happy …' I'd heard it at the end of every job I'd ever had. ‘… with things as they are?'

‘What can I do?' I asked. ‘It's alien territory. The guys are OK for a few seconds as they intersect normality in between getting out of their heads and sweating it out. The rest of the time it's lunacy … Nico hates me …'

‘Perhaps you should ignore them – after all, they
are
little more than circus creatures. Their needs are very basic, their joys are commonplace.'

Things were stirring once more beneath the overcoat. From one of the voluminous pockets he pulled out a Bible. The page was marked with a membership card to ‘Raffles. Gentlemen's Sauna Club.' The text was underlined.

… thou knowest the people,

that they are set upon mischief.

For they said unto me

‘Make us gods, which shall

go before us …'

(
Exodus
32, v. 22–23)

‘Unfortunately,' continued Demetrius, ‘Nico comes from a long line of people without a God they can truly believe in and – worse still – without a sense of humour. She fails to see the entertainment value in a lugubrious piano player, a punk drummer and a dope-fiend guitarist. Nor, sadly – and this is particularly painful for me, James – does she reciprocate the depth of my affection for her … more than affection …
love
.'

So, it was ‘
amore
' after all. I was being employed to facilitate a romance.

In Genova we performed with an armed guard around the stage. Young Argentinians of Italian extraction were meeting their deaths in the South Atlantic. There was a strong anti-English feeling, especially among guys of conscription age.

The promoters had really pumped up Nico's reputation in their pre-concert publicity. The kids were expecting heavy metal Wagner – what they got was Demetrius's circus. Soldiers reconnoitring the stage; Nico wandering on and off, unsure of her lines, coming in with the right lyrics but to the wrong song. A strange ballet to cabaret angst.

‘Beastly business, old boy,' said Demetrius in the dressing-room after the show. ‘Do I take it you'll be yielding to the academic yoke once more next term?'

The study or the circus? The monastery or the madhouse? I looked around. Echo was helping Raincoat retrace his steps down memory lane to the exact moment when his microphone went missing. Nico was locked in her millionth interview about the Velvet Underground – why this, why that, why wasn't it still 1967? Toby was offering to show the rose tattoo on his backside to a couple of cat girls in leopardskin mittens – if they would, in turn, ‘show somethin' of yer beautiful city ter me an' my pal'. He pointed me out. One of them darted a glance at me and giggled into her paws. She was pretty.

Nico stuck her head out of the interview and glared at me. ‘Nymphomaniac!' she spat, and then carried on reliving Andy Warhol's dream. For all of us.

‘See you next term,' I said.

April '82:

CHEZ NICO

Schlaf Kindlein schlaf

Deine Mutter hüt die Schaf

Dein Vater ist in Pommerland

Pommerland ist abgebrannt

Schlaf Kindlein schlaf
.

(Sleep, baby, sleep

Your mother guards the sheep

Your father's gone to Pommerland

Pommerland is burnt to the ground

Sleep, baby, sleep.)

Nico and Demetrius were crooning a hideous lullaby. Dr Lugubrious and Old Mother Hell in full-tilt fireside nostalgia. April in Paris, winter in Prestwich.

‘My earliest memory is of Nanny Cristel singing to me.' Demetrius wiped his misty glasses. ‘First she would dry my little pink body, wrap an enormous towel around me and then rub – ah, how she would rub …'

Echo poked the fire and spat. The gobbet of catarrh-green spume fizzing abruptly in the post-lullaby bliss.

Nico's bags were packed. It was the big send-off, though she was only moving one hundred yards round the corner. Faith didn't like other women in her kitchen, boiling up syringes all the time. And it shamed her to see Echo forever rolling up his sleeve in the hope of a free hit. Faith worried so much she couldn't eat; not that there was ever enough food to feed the whole tribe, including Nico and assorted ephemera. Why couldn't Echo be more of a man and look after his family, instead of being permanently incommunicado, brooding about his new mistress – heroin? It was like he was somewhere else all It was like he was somewhere else all the time. (Daddy's gone to Pommerland.)

‘ … Then she would shower me with baby talc, run the tips of her fingers down the warm yielding crack of my chubby behind and cradle my tiny testicles in her cupped hand … “There, my little man,” she'd say, “there …” '

Knuckles on wood: Echo peeped through the kitchen curtains. Raincoat. He'd borrowed Demetrius's Citroën, ostensibly to take his lumbago-ridden grandmother to the physio, actually to make a run to his mate down the Moss.

‘How's your poor grannie, Raincoat?' asked Demetrius, dropping his catch as Raincoat threw him the car-keys.

‘Notser clever.' Raincoat slurred his words, his pupils like pinheads. ‘But she sez t' tell yer that if there wuz more folk like good ol' Dr Demetrius, wha' a be'er world it'd be, feralluvus.'

Dead leaves still
fluttered
across the path as we carried Nico's things up to her new flat. It was the ground floor of one of those great Victorian Gothic villas built originally for Greek shipowners in the days when the Manchester Ship Canal was the main artery of commerce for King Cotton. Since the turn of the century they'd been a haven for Hasidic Jews fleeing the eternal pogrom of central Europe.

‘Don't they look weeeerd?' said Nico, pointing to a huddle of bearded men and side-curled youths with prayer-white faces.

‘I like the way they look,' I said, ‘it's romantic.'

She examined them more closely, the eighteenth-century dress, frock-coats, gaiters, black hats. ‘They don't wash, you know.'

‘Neither do you,' I replied.

‘I do …' she protested. ‘I took a bath that time in Milan.'

Echo and Raincoat pulled up beside us. Demetrius remained in the car, listening to Country heartaches and feeding on some hot-potato latkes from the kosher kaff.

There was a figure, waving, at the bay window that overlooked the untended garden. Nico suddenly seemed overjoyed and rushed on ahead. Raincoat cast a glance up at the house. ‘I see we'ave Le Fils [pronounced Fills] with us, Le Vray Beau Jolly Newvo'imself … Le Kid.'

‘Her kid?' I'd forgotten about the son.

‘Yeh,' said Echo, ‘ 'er very own creation. Yer gonna love 'im.'

‘What's he called?' I asked.

‘Ari.'

‘Yeh.' Raincoat glowered up at the window. ‘An' we're jus' wild about Ari.'

Ari, Le Kid, was about nineteen, the super-beautiful progeny of a union between the North and the Mediterranean, Nico and Alain Delon. Nico had a brief fling with Delon in her model days. Now Delon absolutely didn't want to know. Le Kid had turned up at the matinée idol's Paris apartment, only to be turned away by the maid. Even though Delon's mother took him in, Le Kid did not exist. Neither did he exist properly for Nico. While he was still in the womb she'd dropped acid along with the usual family favourites, and when he'd cried she found the most expedient solution was to lock him in a cupboard. It must have pained Ari to see pictures of that other Delon Jr, waterskiing with Princess Pixie of Monaco. Famous folk usually buy off responsibility with money – Nico hadn't got it, Delon wouldn't give it. Le Kid opened the door.

‘
Maman. Maman.
' They embraced. He looked over her shoulder at us. His nose twitched in that Frenchified manner, like there was a bad
odeur
. Who were we? More shit she'd picked up on her boots. He turned away from us.

‘
Maman … suis-moi, j'ai un petit cadeau pour toi
.'

We followed them down the hall, me walking backwards, clattering the harmonium against the walls.

‘
Ferme les yeux
,' he said to her. I don't know why, but I did too. ‘
Bien … ouvre
!' He held out a shining new hypodermic, loaded and ready to go. Nico gasped with joy.

A truly loving son understands (and shares) his mother's needs.

The world had shrunk once again, to coal fires, TV game shows, tea drinking and cruel parlour games round at Echo's. Dr Demetrius's Great Adventure had shrivelled overnight. Nico was sitting tight. With a wallet-load of phony credit cards, and a pocket full of valium, Demetrius was happy to spoil her so long as she behaved herself. But the rest of us needed paid work. We'd do the odd one-off gig at Tiffany's, Bradford, just to take the instruments for a walk, but it was nothing like enough. Nico and Demetrius paid such a pittance, the only reward was glamour, and we certainly weren't getting any of that.

I did a one-night stint as a DJ at a regular Thursday ‘Punk Night' Demetrius ran at Rotter's, a vomitorium cellar-club on the Oxford road. I played them one of Demetrius's records: K-Tel's
The Best of Roy Orbison
, ‘as seen on TV'. ‘Blue Bayou' all night long. It seemed a punk thing to do. Mohicans with spider-web cheeks and ‘cut here' neck tattoos would come up: ‘This is shite! Fuck off, cunt!' etc. They got really mad and started turning tables over, throwing bottles. I thought they'd had a good time, but Demetrius wouldn't let me do it again.

Then the rumour started. America. Everyone wanted to go, desperately, except for the star act and manager. Nico had really got to like the Iranian smack, she had a very strong reliable connection, she was getting stuff maybe fifty per cent pure – it would take a lot to prise her away from that.

‘The Yank gear's dreck-powder,' said Echo. ‘About five per cent kosher, not worth touchin' unless yer score about twenny grams an' yer've got works the size of a fookin' stirrup pump.'

Demetrius wanted to go, but couldn't. It would mean the neurasthenic's nightmare of being trapped in an aircraft again. ‘Of course I'm not afraid,' he'd say, ‘it's simply an infection of the middle ear that affects my balance. I believe astronauts can get it.'

Toby would often spend the cocktail hours in that great salon of
fin-de-siècle
languor Happy Times, a shooting gallery in Wythenshawe. Wythenshawe is one of those classic postwar answers to the perennial question: What Shall We Do With the Working Class? If the poor must be forever with us, then at least let's keep them out of sight. It takes the best part of half an hour from Manchester city centre to get there.

‘By the time the filth arrive, the entire contents of yer gaff'ave bin nicked, resold, and some swine in Oldham's watching the Street on
your
telly,' said Toby. Toby lived at his mum's, a traditional Lancashire matriarch, who controlled with an iron grip a household of useless males. Three packs of cigs a day, crippling emphysema, but she'd still give them a good clout round the ear just for the sake of it.

At Happy Times you paid your fiver and you'd get a shot of smack or speed. Mr Happy Times himself just sat all the time in an armchair, monitoring everything from strategically placed mirrors, a .38 under a cushion on his lap. Purity of a kind.

America. You could get a good pair of shoes in America.

‘There's all sorts of tackle in them Thrift Shops,' dreamed Echo. ‘An' when we do L.A. we
must
stay at the Tropicana.' Echo couldn't overstress the importance of the Tropicana motel. Tom Waits lived there. Tom was the only man whose sartorial tastes Echo felt were as intriguing as his own. They shared a mutual passion – shoes. Echo had acquired six pairs on the Italian tour. He wondered if Tom also shared his misfortune in having small feet … it meant that certain coveted styles would never be in stock, and it made the hunt for the perfect pair that much more poignant. It was a theme whose constant tread reverberated throughout his daily life, possibly more urgent even than his routine search for mood-altering drugs.

America had everything. Flame-haired girls in cowboy boots who drank Bud from the bottle and told dirty jokes. Twisters, shapers, sharks and fraudies. People who could tell a good story … and they all lived at the Tropicana.

*

Back at H.Q. Echo, the pretext was rehearsal, but the reality was more sanguinary.

Nico hits the excited vein on the crown of her foot. Blunt needles, disappearing veins. A small trickle of blood weeps down the side. ‘Even when you have the stuff, the needles are dead,' she says.

Echo was eyeing up the cottons that absorb any morphine sediment left in the spoon. (A bit like scraping up Mum's cakemix.)

‘Auntie Nico?' It was little Mercy. ‘Have you hurt your foot?'

‘Not now, chuck.' Echo steered the child towards Faith in the kitchen.

Faith was scrubbing away the shame, furiously trying to maintain a semblance of domestic normality, as if this was a typical suburban household with a slightly eccentric aunt from Germany on an extended visit. She'd guard the children's lives from any accidental encounter with the arcane and perplexing objects that attended Nico's habit. Bent spoons held over sacred flames, sharp syringes – the shining vessels of faith, mysterious scars on her man's arms – the stigmata. For a Catholic girl it was a monstrous sacrilege, the hideous mirror of her family's degradation.

But we were all hooked on something. We'd all been connected by Demetrius's need for stimulation. He liked to experiment with personalities, test loyalties against each other. Like a bizarre
shadchen
or matchmaker, he was curious to see what issue would arise from such unlikely marriages of temperament. It became impossible to distinguish who was using whom, forms of desperation were so varied: Drugs, Money, Sensation, Sex, Travel, Change, Adventure. We'd claimed our appropriate share of these from him in exchange for the subjugation of our individual will. It would be too grandiose to call it a Faustian bargain, yet, on our own gossipy malodorous level, there was the slight stink of sulphur about it, a cloven hoof impressed upon the seal.

*

I was taking a piss in Echo's bathroom. Children's clothes, mould, never dry. I could hear Nico and Demetrius talking outside the back door.

‘… always hanging around. Why? The more of them, the less for me. I can go to America aloone.'

‘Most inadvisable, Heartette. Singermann' – the U.S. promoter – ‘has specified a group. America wants rock'n'roll. You'll be performing for audiences who revere the sacred memory of the King Himself. Much as I love you on your own with the harmonium – the singer/sewing machine – one has to think theatrically, Nico. I must urge you to see the professional sense in performing with a group.'

Nico was silent … there was a lot to assimilate. Then I heard her say, ‘But them?'

‘Darling one, what d'you expect? They come cheap.'

‘Even so, they're always eating – and yooooo tooooo.'

Demetrius coughed. ‘Errr – they use up a lot of energy.'

‘Not on the music they don't … That Jim, with the girls all the time …'

I blushed. I was hearing my death sentence.

‘He's classically trained.'

‘He sure is … he won't play like
I
want. That stupid synthesiser thing he's got, he has no idea. He makes it sound like a kazooooo or something … reedeeculouss.'

‘He's very good,' Demetrius insisted. ‘He plays a charming little study by Erik Satie: “Gymnasium” or something … how does it go? Dum da di da, da di dum da di da … or is it da di dum, da di da da di dum?'

Silence again.

‘And Echo.' (I was not to die alone.) ‘I just wish he wouldn't bug me for stuff all the time.'

‘I've arranged for him to see Dr Strang up at Prestwich … once he gets a methadone script he'll stop bothering you.'

‘I don't know … there's the money …'

‘
Your
fee is assured, my sweet. I'm sending my best lieutenant – Bags – along. He's absolutely right for the bank.'

I flushed and walked out past them. I could tell they were worried in case I'd overheard anything. I wanted to reassure them I hadn't, so I smiled, and whistled ‘Gymnasium'.

I told Echo what I'd heard. He was utterly unsurprised. Assuming Nico even wanted us along as bellhops and ballboys and we actually made it to America, we'd all be in for ‘a good drubbin”. He reckoned we would get there, though, so long as we kept her needs first. Priority Nico. If she was a hasbeen, then we were never-will-bes, and we had to keep our heads down, just as we had to keep her high. So high that she could maintain her distance from us emotionally and soar away from us in performance on stage every night. We had to stay part of her connection, as Echo said.