Take No Prisoners (12 page)

Then it was a while later and I was sitting in the kitchen of the house we'd all shared since the start of term. Crotchy had lent me his "other" guitar so that I could work out the tune. He wasn't going to be needing it because Fallopia – maybe it was the booze – had finally, after all these weeks, said he could share her bed and he'd tell me about it in the morning. I wasn't too upset, of course – why should I have been? Just a little surprised, that's all, but after all she was a fully grown adult. I was happy for them in their happiness as my fingers picked out the chords; the tap in the sink served as my rhythm track.

~

He's timed things perfectly, as he always does, and the pair of you reach the bus stop at the very moment the final mutilated chords echo away and there's nothing but the tape's dispassionate hiss. He clicks the stop button firmly; there's the air about him of a man who's just performed a difficult job very competently. His eyes are quite bright and alert as he surveys first the two old bags waiting there ahead of him and second the road to the right of him, checking there aren't any minibuses in sight.

He nods to himself, pleased.

Nothing.

With luck there won't be a minibus for at least two minutes and thirty-six seconds, which is how long the second track lasts. If one does come before then it won't be a disaster, of course – he'll just wave it on impatiently as if it's not going to the right destination for him – but he always hates the times when that happens, resents the momentary intrusion.

You don't resent it yourself – not directly, anyway. It vexes you only at second hand, as it were, because it annoys him. You're glad it's such a short track, so that there's every chance he'll have time to hear it the whole way through. One year an old guy tapped him on the shoulder and shouted through the muffling earphones for the price of a cup of tea, and you thought there was going to be murder on the street. You look backwards and forwards anxiously with your not-eyes, but there's nary a drunk in sight.

Dave presses the "start" button and leans against the Adshel, feeling its hard plastic give slightly against his back. He's excavated a battered old Boar's Head tin from a pocket of his green corduroy jacket, and he's rubbing some of the powdery-dry black dust into a slightly clammy-feeling Rizla blue. The roll-up'll ignite like tinder when he's finished making it, but that's all right because you're not allowed to smoke on the minibuses anyway.

~

when I came down from Bristol town

I was utterly alone.

I spent my days just wandering round

through streets I'd never known,

and when at last I found someone

who seemed to care at all,

I said, "please, please, please, mister,

let me punch your wall"

~

The tune came out better than it had been intended to be, even though there were only five chords in it. It wasn't exactly Beethoven or even "Roll Over, Beethoven," but it was good enough to tap your toes to if you didn't have anything better to do with your toes at the time. I sung the thing through the following day after we'd all got back from lectures. Crotchy and Buster were reasonably take-it-or-leave-it – it was "adequate," said Buster, which just about summed things up (he got really bad hangovers, and the Ghoulies joke hadn't seemed so funny today, especially not during Soviet macroeconomics, whatever the hell that was) – but Alyss, who'd very sensibly stopped off at the chemist's on the way home, said she liked it. She grabbed her White, Handler, Smith off me and we did the thing together, and with her singing it it sounded a lot better than it had when it had just been me, so Crotchy got his plank and Buster, a bit reluctantly, his bass. I drummed on the kitchen-table, marvelling as always about the nice sound thick-gravy-stains-on-fablon produces. Crotchy and Buster plugged themselves into the little amp-speaker unit they kept beside the toaster and we ran it through a few times and it sounded ... yes, adequate: Buster had been right.

Next Friday's revelers at the Double Locks thought it was pretty good, anyway. Since Jamie took the place over they get a lot of younger people down there, but back in those days it was one of those pubs where the landlord scours the obit columns in the local paper to see if it's worth opening up that evening. Well, not quite. Some of the people there might have been under forty. The guy who was running the place was trying to make it appeal a bit more to yuppies, and we were part of his grand, failing campaign. I think half the punters thought it was an old Gerry and the Pacemakers number they couldn't remember having heard before; the other half had never heard of modern stuff like Gerry and the Pacemakers. (My dad used to play Gerry and the Pacemakers to me – them and the Swingin' Blue Jeans and Freddie and the Dreamers. Then he had the nerve to tell me Genesis sucked.)

Since no one had actually thrown anything at us, we started to include "Hill Snow and the Day of Peace" in our regular act. It was about the only change we made all that term and halfway through the vac. (We stayed on in Exeter for the vac, none of us having anything we particularly wanted to go home for except money, and you can post money, can't you?) Oh, yeah, there a few things. Crotchy and Buster got themselves bow ties, because the guy who ran one of our naicer venues suggested it would make us look a bit more upmarket; they wore the things everywhere else, too, for a piss-take no one noticed. Alyss only slept with Crotchy a couple of times before returning to her nunnishness; it suited her, for some reason I couldn't fathom. Buster got seriously involved with some girl from the poly who later proved to be under-age, which made for a lot of moist eyes in the starlight and crossing-off of days on the calendar. I just drifted along, the way I've always been so good at doing, quite enjoying
Piers Plowman
, quite enjoying
Beowulf
, quite enjoying
Sir Gawaine and the Green Knight
...

The funny thing was that none of us ever thought of writing any more songs to go with "Hill Snow." We'd written it as a joke, but those few headbangers who listened to the lyrics in between the scrumpies seemed to take them perfectly seriously. I mentioned this to Crotchy one time, and he laughed. "Buster was right," he said. "Make the crap pretentious enough and people'll think it's for real."

Then there was the night we were playing the Drunken Driver, a not-bad pub (you've guessed it) just opposite St David's Station. After we'd finished and were tucking into our post-gig on-the-house pizza marinara and chips, a young, thin-faced bloke in a jockey cap came over and asked if it was OK to join us.

We got to know Jaques (spelt that way, no "c," and pronounced "Jakes") quite well over the next few weeks. He was an all-right person – very straight unless you were the SS, in which case I'd guess he'd have been about as honest as a magpie, with his six kids, invalid grandmother and mortgage repayments. His mum was nice, too, when we met her in the council house the two of them shared. She'd allowed him to rig up the garage as a sort of rudimentary recording studio – egg-boxes, ancient four-track, remember that Concorde goes over late afternoon – and he'd managed to con a couple of relatives into "investing" enough in him so that he could press a couple of singles a year. So far Scrubbadubba Records hadn't precisely recouped its capital, but the bands he'd recorded were slowly selling their way through his stocks at their gigs.

That was Jaques's resumé, as he told it to us in the Drunken Driver. His proposal: if we wanted to cut a disc of "Hill Snow," which he didn't much like himself but thought was commercial enough to outweigh his more worthy enterprises, he'd take a gamble. He'd only just got round to telling the SS that his uncle had contracted chronic diarrhea six months ago and moved in, so he had some back-pay to play with. He couldn't offer us anything but a share of the profits.

Well, why not?

We didn't have a B-side, that was why not.

We couldn't do one of the other numbers we regularly played, because that'd have got us all into copyright hassles.

No problem, said Alyss, smiling at me the way she smiled only at me: we can write another song together, can't we, Dave?

Two days later we had "Let Me Punch Your Wall." Alyss wrote the lyrics all by herself this time; and, although she meant them to be funny the way "Hill Snow" was, I could hear the sad little yearning voice that was hiding away behind their smothering shield. In her first year at university in Exeter, I knew, she'd been pretty lonely; all her Bristol friends had scattered to their different universities up and down the country, and she was having difficulty making new ones who didn't want to feel her up the whole time. I hadn't realized this, of course; I'd seen her across the Drum Bar a couple of times, sitting on her own with a book, and wished I'd had the courage to go and say hello to her, but I'd assumed she was waiting for some handsome, intelligent, athletic hunk bastard of a boyfriend. It's funny how prettiness can be a burden like that for women. They never know if men actually like
them
or are just hoping to get to bed with them, which most of them are; while the people like me who'd want to make friends with them as people are frightened off by the nonexistent competition. And she was very pretty – more than pretty. She was only small, and had very pale skin; her eyes were yellow-green. She wore her hair short in what I later learned was called a gamin cut; it was that kind of coppery red that the bark of silver birches can sometimes be. It sounds a cliché, but she had an elfin face: pointy little chin; small, expressive mouth; cheekbones tinged with pink.

Anyway.

I tried to get as much of her remembered solitariness into the tune of "Let Me Punch Your Wall" as I could, and though I say it myself it turned out a very, very lovely little song. Even Buster thought it was good: "haunting," he called it in an off-hand sort of sarcasm when he first heard it, but often enough later I'd hear him whistling it. It'd have been all wrong for an A-side, of course, but it was just right for the flip of "Hill Snow." That was round about the end of the period when people bought singles for their A-sides and ended up playing the B-sides instead.

As I say, Alyss wrote the lyrics all by herself. She was to do the same for our next three songs, too. I wrote the last one in its entirety – words and music both.

But that wasn't to be for a while.

~

Someone – presumably God – must be orchestrating your journey today, because the minibus arrives just as Dave's thumb presses the "stop" button again. He looks satisfied, as if there isn't any luck involved, as if things are working out just exactly the way they were planned to be.

Politely he gestures to the two bags, who're still talking like geese, up the steps ahead of him; neither of them pauses in their logorrheic spate to acknowledge the courtesy, which is about par for bags. He has his exact fare ready for the driver; he takes his ticket and pushes up the narrow, shopping-littered aisle to a vacant seat at the back. A couple of other people clamber on, one of them a young mother with an unbelievably tiny alabaster child clamped against her chest in a sling; he half-rises, but someone nearer the front of the minibus has already stood. The driver lets in the gear with a groan.

It normally takes about seven minutes to get to the High Street, where he has to change buses for the river. In the rush-hour it can take a lot longer, of course, but this isn't the rush-hour. Anyway, delay's not the worry. Mid-morning, like this, the road's pretty clear and, if there aren't many people wanting to get on or off and the driver's in a rush, the trip can take only three or four minutes – which is cutting things fine. The next track on the C90 lasts just over four minutes.

The whole journey becomes quite exciting for you. You're not listening to the tape, of course; instead you alternate your not-gaze up and down between his digital watch, where his hand rests on the rail in front of him, and the road ahead. It seems to take forever for the numbers to change, and the vehicle is whipping along merrily, skipping right past the stops because it's already full.

Dave notices nothing of this, naturally.

Fortunately a child's been run over in Sidwell Street, so the traffic's being diverted round by the bus station. That'll add at least a couple of minutes to the journey time – more than enough.

How kind of God to maim a child especially.

~

all the other women they got stockings and tights

but when I snuggle with my lover that just doesn't seem r-i-i-i-ight ...

so I'm a little looker wantsta turn back all the clocks:

when I strip off for bedtime I just strip on my socks,

'cos I got socks

socks

yeah I got socks.

I ain't got the measles

I ain't got the chickenpox

I got socks ...

~

Devonair, the local radio station, played "Hill Snow" quite a lot, but for a while that was the only airtime it got.

We weren't too worried. Our finals had suddenly stopped being in the infinite future and started being nine months away, so all four of us were spending most of our time working: although of course we were living in the same house, we only really saw very much of each other on Friday nights, when we'd get all the gear together and trundle off in the back of the old banger Crotchy had bought himself to whichever pub reckoned it needed us. Jaques popped around from time to time to tell us gloomily about all the copies the single wasn't selling (the half-dozen or so we were getting rid of at each gig was about the extent of things), but soon he saw he was just interrupting our studies and he stopped coming.

Buster split up with his polytechnic girl; or, at least, she split up with him – preferring, as she apparently explained to him, someone younger. He was pretty fucked up about it for a while, but then Fallopia very sweetly took pity on him and, as it were, screwed him back to sanity. It was an act of genuine friendship on her part, she told me, but I was unconscionably relieved when the arrangement fizzled out. Shared houses can be a bit of a strain at the best of times; sex between the occupants can so often lead to emotional tensions that shatter the whole precarious edifice. The same applies to bands, of course.