Stories We Could Tell (7 page)

‘Let me write something,’ Leon begged. ‘Give me next week’s cover. Hitler said that if they’d crushed him when he was small, he would never have succeeded.’

‘This shower are just a bunch of skinheads, that’s all,’ White said, taking the
Sunday Telegraph
from Leon and looking at the picture of the flag-waving mob. ‘They couldn’t find their own arse without a road map, I can’t see them invading Poland.’ He handed back the newspaper. ‘And Elvis Costello is on next week’s cover.’ White thought about it. ‘But all right – you can give me 500 words on Lewisham. Anybody go to this demo?’

Leon smiled. ‘I’m assuming you don’t mean thousands of anti-Fascist protesters, boss. I guess you mean rock stars. Concerned rock stars.’

White rolled his eyes. ‘Anyone our readers might’ve heard of.’

‘No, they were all too busy doing photo shoots and getting their teeth capped to fight Fascism. But I hear John Lennon is in town.’

Ray’s jaw fell open. He stared at Leon, not believing a word of it. ‘Lennon’s in New York,’ he said. ‘In the Dakota with Yoko and baby Sean.’

Leon shook his head. ‘Lennon’s in London,’ he said. ‘For one night only. Someone at EMI just called me. Thought it might make an item in the diary. Passing through on his way to Japan.’ Leon cackled. ‘Give me McCartney any day of the week. At least Paul
knows
he’s a boring old fart who sold out years ago. Think Beatle John would fancy pinning on his Chairman Mao badge and coming
to the next riot? Has he still got his beret? Or should we start the revolution without him?’

‘Well, he started it without you,’ Kevin White said. ‘Come on – what are you doing for us, Leon?’

Leon’s face fell. Ray knew that’s what they always said when they wanted you to get in line.
What are you doing for us?
‘Well, mostly I’ll be working on this riot story,’ Leon said. ‘I thought we could call it
Dedicated Followers of Fascism
. Maybe – ’

White consulted a scrap of paper on his desk. ‘Leni and the Riefenstahls are at the Red Cow tonight. You can give me a review of that by first thing tomorrow morning – 800 words.’

Leon nodded. ‘So that’s 500 words for the fight against Fascism, and 800 words for Leni and the Riefenstahls – who less than a year ago were parading around the 100 Club in swastika armbands. Right.’

‘We’re still a music paper, Leon.’

Leon laughed. ‘That’s right. We’re doing the pogo while Rome burns.’

‘A good journalist can write well about anything. Look at that piece by your father this morning. You see that?’ White asked, turning to Ray. ‘A piece about the cod war – what could be more boring than the cod war?’

‘I didn’t see it,’ Ray said, still thinking about John Lennon. But he knew that Leon’s father wrote a column for a liberal broadsheet. He was one of the few journalists in Fleet Street that was read and respected up at
The Paper
.

‘It was about the decline of Britain as an imperial power,’ White told Ray. ‘About how we used to go to war to fight for freedom. And now we go to war to fight about fish. Brilliant.’ White shook his head. ‘Brilliant. Tell him how much I liked it, would you?’

‘Bit tricky that,’ Leon said, edging towards the door.

‘Why’s that?’ White said.

‘I don’t talk to my father.’

They were all silent for a bit. Leon caught Ray’s eye and looked away.

Oh; White said. Okay.’

Leon closed the door behind him. Ray realised that the editor of
The Paper
was watching his face.

‘So,’ White said. ‘Think you can get me John Lennon?’

Ray gawped, feeling the sweat break out on his face. ‘Get you John Lennon? Who do I call? How do I get you John Lennon?’

White laughed. ‘You don’t call anyone. There’s no one to call. No press officers, no publicists. EMI can’t help you – this is a private trip. You just go out there and
find
him. Then you
talk
to him. Like a real grown-up reporter. Like a real journalist. Like Leon’s father. Like that. Think you can do it?’

There was so much that Ray wanted to say to John Lennon that he was sure he would not be able to say a word. Even if he could find him among the ten million souls in that Waterloo sunset.

‘I don’t know,’ Ray said honestly.

‘If you find him,’ White said, his blood starting to pump, his editor’s instincts kicking in, ‘we’ll put him on the cover. World exclusive – John talks!’

‘But – but what about pictures?’

White looked exasperated. ‘Not Lennon the way he is now – he must be knocking on for forty! No, an old shot from the archives. Lennon the way he was in Hamburg – short hair and a leather jacket, skinny and pale. You know what that would look like, don’t you?’

Ray thought about it. ‘That would look like…now.’

‘Exactly!
Very
1977.
Totally
1977. Nothing could be more now than the way the Beatles looked in Hamburg. They were out of their boxes on speed, did you know that? I can see the cover copy:
Another kid in a leather jacket on his way to God knows where…’

‘But Leon says he’s leaving tomorrow!’

White’s fist slammed down on his desk. ‘Come on, Ray. Are you a writer – or a fan?’

Ray needed to think about that. He had no idea if he was a real journalist, or if he would ever be. How could you tell? Who had ever dreamed that loving music would turn into a full-time job? He was a kid who had written about music because it was more interesting than a paper round, and because they didn’t give you free records if you stacked shelves in a supermarket.

‘I don’t know what I am,’ he said.

But Kevin White was no longer listening. The editor was staring over at the door, and Ray followed his gaze. On the other side of the rectangular pane of glass, there were men in suits waiting to see Kevin White. Men from upstairs, management, bald old geezers with ties and wrinkles who looked like your dad, or somebody’s dad. They were waiting for White to finish with Ray. Sometimes White had to smooth things out with them. One time a cleaner found a wastepaper bin full of roaches, and suddenly there were men in suits everywhere, all having a fit. But White worked it out. He was a great editor. Ray didn’t want to let him down.

‘I’ll try my best,’ Ray said. ‘But I don’t know if I’m a real journalist or just somebody who likes music.’

Kevin White stood up. It was time for him to face the men in suits again.

‘You’d better find out,’ the editor said.

Leon was gone. Terry was sitting on his desk, his DMs dangling, flicking through the copy of last week’s
Paper
that Misty had given him at the airport.

‘This is what you need, Ray,’ he said.
‘New! The Gringo Waistcoat. Get into the Original Gringo Waistcoat – the new style
. You’d look lovely in a Gringo Waistcoat.’

Ray dropped into his chair and stared into space. Terry didn’t notice. It was an endless source of amusement to him that the
classifieds in
The Paper
were always exactly one year behind the times. While the kid in the street was trying to look like Johnny Rotten, the models in the ads still looked like Jason King.

Cotton-drill loons – still only £2.80…Moccasin boots – choose from one long top fringe or three freaky layers
.

According to the classifieds, the readers of
The Paper
were wearing exactly what they had been wearing for the last ten years – flared jeans, Afghan coats, cheesecloth galore, and, always and for ever, T-shirts with amusing slogans. Sometimes it felt like
The Paper
would not exist without T-shirts with amusing slogans.

I CHOKED LINDA LOVELACE. LIE DOWN I THINK I LOVE YOU. SEX APPEAL – GIVE GENEROUSLY. And that timeless classic, the fucking flying ducks – two cartoon ducks, coupling in mid-flight, the male duck looking hugely satisfied, the female duck looking alarmed.

Terry leaned back, smiling to himself, his spiky head resting against a picture he had torn from a library book and sellotaped to his wall – Olga Korbut, smiling sweetly, bent double on the mat. After the Montreal Olympics last year, a lot of people had switched their affections to the Romanian girl, Nadia Comaneci, but Terry was sticking with Olga.

They each had their own wall, facing their desk with its typewriter, a sleek Olivetti Valentine in red moulded plastic. On Terry’s wall were bands and girls – record company 8 × 10 glossies of the New York Dolls, the Clash and the Sex Pistols plus images pillaged from magazines of Debbie Harry in a black mini-dress, Jane Fonda in
Barbarella
and Olga Korbut at the Munich Olympics.

Leon’s wall was by far the most artistic – an undercoat of favourite bands had been almost obliterated by headlines cut from newspapers, with yet another layer of breaking news and advertising slogans pasted on top. So a record company glossy of the Buzzcocks had a headline about the death of Mao Tse-Tung running diagonally across it, while a yellowing picture from
The Times
of
General Franco’s coffin was enhanced with an ad for the new Only Ones single. And as Ray swung round in his chair and took out his tape recorder, he was watched by pictures of John Lennon.

There were also dog-eared images of Joni Mitchell and Dylan and Neil Young, but Ray’s wall was really a shrine to Lennon. John gone solo, in white suit and round NHS specs, Yoko hanging on to his arm. John when he had just started growing his hair, that golden middle period of
Revolver
and
Rubber Soul
John during Beatlemania, grinning in a suit with the rest of the boys. And the leather-jacket John of Hamburg, all James Dean cock and swagger, too vain to wear his glasses…

This fucking, fucking tape recorder!

The problem was that one of the spools was slightly off kilter. Ray had probably bent it pulling out the cassette after interviewing Phil Lynott with one too many screwdrivers and half a spliff in his system. Now the spool described an erratic circle when it should be standing up straight. You couldn’t stick this thing in front of John Lennon.

Terry guffawed. ‘Listen to this,’ he said. ‘Couple of girls trying to get up a petition to get Roxy Music back on the road – they say,
Roxy Must Rule Again!

Ray looked over his shoulder, smiling at his friend. The classifieds were a magic kingdom of musicians wanted, records wanted, girlfriends wanted, perfect worlds wanted, where ads for Greenpeace and Save the Whales were right next to ads for cotton-drill loon pants and Gringo Waistcoats.

But Ray saw that though there was derision in Terry’s laughter, there was also something that he could only identify as love.

This was their paper. This was their thing. This was their place. And soon he would be asked to leave. He didn’t know how he could stand it.

“Badge collectors read on,”
said Terry, and then he looked up at Ray. ‘What the fuck’s wrong with you?’

‘Nothing.’ When you grew up with brothers, you learned you always had to come straight back at them. ‘What the fuck’s wrong with you?’

Ray turned his back to Terry, busying himself at his desk, trying to straighten the bent spool on his tape recorder, and letting his hair fall forward so that his friend couldn’t see the panic and pain in his eyes.

Leon’s squat was in a large, decaying white house on a street of boarded-up buildings.

There was a kind of muddy moat around the perimeter of the house with wooden planks leading across it, like the ramshackle drawbridge of a rotting castle. On the ground floor the cracked and crumbling white plaster was almost obliterated by slogans.

WE ARE THE WRITING ON YOUR WALL. NO DRUGS IN HERE. CATS LIKE PLAIN CRISPS. Someone had changed a scrawled white NF into a bold black NAZIS OUT.

Leon slipped his hand into his leather jacket and felt for his key, glancing over his shoulder before he began negotiating his way across the planks. He had been in the squat for over a year now, ever since he had dropped out of the LSE and started full time on
The Paper
, but there was still a taste of fear in his mouth whenever he came back. You never knew when the bailiffs and cops would be coming. You never knew what was waiting for you.

As soon as he was inside the hallway a hairy unwashed face appeared at the top of the stairs, as Leon knew it would, as it always did. It wasn’t just Leon. There was a creeping paranoia about squat life that never really went away. It seemed strangely familiar to Leon, because he thought it was not so different to the suspicion
lurking behind the net curtains of the rich suburb where he had grown up.

‘Someone’s waiting for you,’ said the hairy face at the top of the stairs.

Leon was amazed. Nobody was ever waiting for him.

‘Some straight,’ said the hairy guy. ‘Reckons he’s your father.’

I
knew
it, Leon thought, his stomach sinking. I
knew
something bad was going to happen.

‘The French guys don’t like it,’ said the face at the top of the stairs. ‘We nearly didn’t let him in.’

‘You shouldn’t have,’ Leon said, trying to keep his voice calm, trying to pretend he was in control. He began climbing the stairs.

The squat was meant to be some kind of democracy, but in reality it was run by the French and Germans, who were older, who had been doing this for years, who talked about adventures in places like Paris and Amsterdam with such authority that Leon always fell silent, and felt like a kid who had seen nothing of the world. Leon was furious that his father should embarrass him in front of these great men.

At the top of the stairs he heard the usual babble of languages and sounds. The floorboards of the squat were bare and everything echoed and seemed louder than it should have. The Grateful Dead, turned up to ten, an argument about the murder of Leon Trotsky, another argument about a borrowed bottle of milk, and a woman’s voice, apparently soothing a baby.

Leon wondered what his father would make of the overwhelming smell, for the squat was full of ripe scents, the trapped air behind the boarded-up windows reeking of dry rot, unwashed clothes, joss sticks and, seeping into everything, the odour of the vegetable soup that was permanently simmering on a big black stove.