Driving Big Davie (Dan Starkey) (3 page)

'Strummer.'

'Strummer?'

'Joe's dead, Dan. I had to call. He's gone. It was just on the news. Of all the people in all the world, I had to call you.'

'Joe?'

'Joe.'

'But he's only . . .'

'I know, Dan.' His voice was shaky.

'Davie.' Christ Almighty, so was mine. Joe Strummer. Rock'n'roll. Bottles of cider on the beach, pogo-ing madly, parties, gigs, fanzines, singles, spiked hair, anarchy, gobbing, missing the last bus home, forming bands, posing with sunglasses, writing lyrics, wailing into a mike, trying to learn a chord, abusing people wearing cords, flares, big permed hair, being attacked for wearing drainpipes, being chased by Rockers, throwing up, sniffing Poppers, having just the best time of our lives. And all traced directly back to Joe. It was just miserable to know that he was dead. And then the tears came. It was just the most shocking, horrible news I could think of.

'Dan, are you okay?'

'Yes . . . yes. It's just — devastating.'

'I know . . . I know. I knew you'd understand. Everyone round here's looking at me like I'm a head the ball. But Strummer.
Jesus.'

I tried to wipe at my tears but they kept coming.

Then there was a knock on the door.

'Mr Starkey? Is everything all right?'

'Yes!'
It wasn't a shout, it was a wail.

Strummer was dead.

'Are you sure?'

The nurse didn't wait for an answer; I heard a key in the door, and it opened inwards. She was standing there looking concerned, her mouth open, her eyes wide. Patricia was standing behind her, looking perplexed, but not, I later thought, unduly surprised. And I was standing there, with my zip down, my trousers slightly damp, tears tripping me.

From the bathroom, my new friend bellowed:
'GIVE ME YOUR BIG COCK! YESSSSS!'

I swallowed. I raised the phone again.' I'm going to have to call you back, Davie,' I said.

Davie. Big Davie Kincaid.

Davie was six foot two before he was fifteen years old, a lanky big fella who could get served in off-licences years before anyone else in our crowd but always went bright red when a girl talked to him. For two years from the summer of 1977, he was my best mate. My parents, in one of their rare moments of adventure, had moved the fifteen miles down from Belfast into a seaside village called Groomsport in search of a quiet life. I was fifteen years old and full of testosterone, hormones, spunk and punk and it was like moving to another world. I was a product of the rough tough streets of Belfast; Groomsport on the other hand had some rather nice cul-de-sacs. The nearest it had to a paramilitary organisation was the Boys' Brigade. It was my particular claim to fame that I introduced punk rock to Groomsport. Before my arrival it had been a tasteless wasteland of showbands and Genesis; within a week it was dancing to Richard Hell and The Voidoids. The local youth club grooved to Patrick Hernandez and 'Born to be Alive'. Within a week I'd kids pogo-ing to The Stranglers' 'No More Heroes'. It was a mini-me version of 'Anarchy in the UK' and I loved it; it was a great time to be alive, and the perfect time to get beaten up.

Because of course there was the slightly older generation, into Queen and Zeppelin, who felt threatened by punk — dinosaurs staring into the pit of their own destruction. Actually they were just pissed off by spotty-faced drunks causing a racket. Either way, they'd chase us and nail us from time to time, but it didn't put us off or slow us down. Me and Davie would sail into The Stables, the biggest local bar, every Saturday night without fail, looking like twin clones of Sid Vicious, and order our pints. We'd be refused, because I looked about twelve. Then we'd fire off the verbal abuse and we'd be thrown out.

'Two pints of Harp, mate.'

'How old are you?' Vernon the barman would ask.

'Nineteen.'

'Date of birth?'

'Thirteenth of the sixth I960.'

They wouldn't even bother to work it out.

'ID?'

'I'm nineteen, right?'

'Sorry, son, try again when you've got some bum-fluff on your cheeks.'

And the whole bar would laugh.

'Fuck you, you fat cunt!' Davie would shout, dipping into his
Penguin Book of Oscar Wilde Epigrams.

'Out!'

'Yeah, you and whose army?'

Well, actually, him and most of the bar would throw us out.

It was a ritual.

We always had an ace up our sleeve — the off-licence round the corner where Davie would get served those big flagons of Olde English cider. We'd take them down to the park and sit with our little shoe-box cassette player and get completely pissed listening to The Clash and The Buzzcocks and Belfast bands Protex, Ruefrex and Rudi. Then we'd call for Karen.

Ah now, to be fifteen again.

Karen Malloy was fifteen, going on twenty-one, the most beautiful girl either of us had ever seen. We were both totally in love, smitten, in lust; and because we were both too shy to ask her out, or to face the absolute certainty of a humiliating rejection, we did what teenage boys have always done: we hung around, annoying her. Where she went, we went; where she played, we played; when she went to school, we were there at the bus stop, when she came off her bus, we were idling nearby; when she took her spaniel for a walk we went too, trailing behind like we were in heat — and we were; it was the only exercise either of us got. We shadowed her to church, we followed her home; her parents called the cops on us half a dozen times for loitering outside her house, but it didn't stop us. And looking back, I don't think we ever even spoke to her. The occasional, 'Hi,' maybe. She had short blonde hair, thin lips, a big smile; we followed her into Unicorn Records once and saw her buy an Electric Light Orchestra album, but we dismissed that as pure innocence we would soon correct. The interesting thing was that we both pursued her with never any talk about what we'd do if she
did
happen to take an interest, as if somehow she would want to go out with both of us at the same time rather than split us up. Or she would make her choice, and Davie would go off and commit suicide, and I wouldn't mind in the slightest because I was going out with Karen Malloy. But she was never going to go out with us. I think we knew that, deep down. We just couldn't give her up. We thought that by hanging around her we would grow on her. That she would see us for the wonderful, dynamic, funny boys we thought we were.

I remember one night, we went round to her house after midnight and threw stones at her bedroom window. Of course we were pissed at the time. We missed completely and cracked the next door's glass. We took off, cackling. We were still laughing about it in the park when the neighbour caught up with us. We debated briefly whether to make a fight of it, but decided to be meek and apologetic instead; the fact that she was seventy years old and on a walking stick meant that we probably would have won the fight, but then be lynched by her family. She'd been down the pub for a drink and was hobbling home when she happened upon us smashing her window.

So we said sorry.

'Sorry, missus.' She didn't seem too put out, actually.

'You boys are always hanging around.'

We shrugged.

'It's Karen, isn't it?'

We shrugged.

'You're like sticking plasters.'

We shrugged.

Davie, emboldened by drink, said: 'She's the most beautiful girl I've ever met.'

'You've never met her,' I pointed out.

'She is beautiful,' the old woman said.' Up to a point.'

'What're you talking about, up to a point?'

She smiled benevolently at Davie. She took a seat on one of the swings in the children's playground she'd cornered us in. She put her hand out and Davie was confused for a moment, then the penny dropped and he gave her the flagon. She took a long drink of the sweet alcohol. She wiped her hand across her mouth.' Ah,' she said, 'that takes me back.'

Davie winked at me.' Don't fancy yours much,' he whispered.

'Any port in a storm,' I replied, and probably meant it.

'Anyway,' Davie said, 'what shite are you talking about — "she's beautiful, up to a point"?'

The old woman explained: 'She's a nice kid, and yes all right, she's pretty enough. But lads — I see you hanging around her all the time and she's not the slightest bit interested. She's fifteen. Fifteen-year-old girls don't want fifteen-year-old boys. They want older boys. Believe me, I know.'

We looked at our feet. She was speaking the truth, we knew it.

'Besides, she's only beautiful in Groomsport.'

'What the fuck are you talking about now?' Davie snapped.

'Listen to me. Look at this place. Groomsport. About a thousand people. And in a place this size, yes, she's considered beautiful. But go a mile down the road to Bangor, put her in with the girls there, she'd merely be good-looking. Go ten miles up the road to Belfast, and what's considered good-looking in Bangor would be merely okay, maybe even plain. And send her to London, they'd think she'd been beaten with the ugly stick.'

'What the fuck are you talking about?' Davie snapped again.

She took another swig of his cider.' If you want to pursue beauty, go to the big city. That's how it works. Beautiful people get better jobs and gravitate to the city. There they meet other beautiful people and have beautiful children. It's the way things are. That's the thing about little country villages. The slow and the plain and the unambitious get left behind, and they marry and they have slower and plainer and less ambitious children. Don't let it happen to you, boys. You're bright, I can see that. You're individuals. Get out of here while you can.'

I started to think about this. It seemed to make sense, but then I was pissed on cider.

Davie was nodding sagely as well.

Then he pushed her off her swing and stole her handbag.

He took off into the night, cackling wildly.

And I ran after him.

I drove down to Groomsport two nights after the incident in the Quiet Room. This was a calculated risk as I hadn't possessed a driving licence for some considerable time. There had been a small 'incident' which forced some dozy judge to remove it until, and I quote, 'hell freezeth over'. But now that terrorism was largely a dying art there weren't so many security checkpoints on the roads, so the chances of me being caught out were much reduced. I just had to drive carefully. It wasn't a problem. I'm a careful kind of a guy. I drove down the coast at a steady thirty-five miles per hour. Other motorists screamed abuse at me, but it was water off a duck's back.

Somehow it didn't surprise me that Davie had never moved away from the village. We'd enjoyed two golden years of punk, but then my parents had grown tired of the constant sniffles of Irish seaside life and gone back to the city. For a while Davie came up to see me at weekends; funnily enough I can't remember ever going back down to Groomsport to see him. I met new friends, different girls, then Trish, my first proper relationship, my only proper relationship. She met Davie a couple of times and seemed to like him, but was quite wary of him as well. Maybe she was jealous of how close we had been, but she needn't have worried because we really weren't close at all any more. After a while he stopped coming up; there was the occasional phone call, then Christmas cards. Then nothing. I heard on the grapevine that he had joined the police, and then a couple of times while out reporting I ran into him. He was big and imposing with his uniform and gun; I was usually bedraggled and hungover. Our conversations were stilted and embarrassing. He was a cop, and being a cop changes you. It goes with the territory. God knows what he made of me. We exchanged numbers and promised to give each other a bell, but we never did.

Sad, really.

And then Joe Strummer pops his clogs and I'm motoring down to The Stables in Groomsport to meet him and really not knowing what to expect. It had to be at least eight years since I'd last bumped into him; then hurried words on a mobile and an agreement to meet up soon while a gay nurse jacked off in the background and my wife screamed at me.

I pulled into The Stables car park. Patricia had given her tacit approval to me driving down to meet him but warned me against drinking and driving. Davie said he'd put me up for the night. Fair enough. The bar had changed quite a bit over the years; it had once boasted the kind of musty smell you get in pubs that don't bother to clean their carpets from one decade to the next, but now everything was new and polished and family-friendly. Same staff, though. Big Vernon, who'd once terrorised us, thumping us around the ears and hurling us out into the car park, Vernon whom we'd terrorised in return, running a hose pipe into his car and filling it with water, ordering tonnes of coal for his apartment — he was behind the bar, paunchier, balder, but still recognisably Vernon.

He saw me, looked puzzled, then surprised, then pointed to the doors.' Out,' he said.' You're barred.'

I stood my ground.' Yeah? You and whose army?'

'Me and this army,' he scowled, and nodded at the bar before him and the three guys sitting with their backs to me. One by one they turned around, growling.

'All right, lads,' I said.

I was forty years old. I was too old to run away, and too old to stand and fight. I was caught in no-man's land cursing the mistakes of my youth and the eternal memories of smalltown hard men.

And then they smiled.

They came off their stools laughing and said: "Bout ya, Dan — how're you doin'?'

I was staggered.

I looked closer. Jesus. Bald — fat — bearded . . . these were
old friends.
Mark, Tommy, Sean — punks of my generation gone to seed. They had their hands out and were clapping me on the back and saying how great it was to see me and what the hell had I been up to.

'Jesus, guys, bolt from the blue or what. Let me get you a drink.'

'No,' Vernon snapped. Then quickly followed with: 'The drinks are on me. Eh, Dan? Local celeb returns home.'

'Celeb?'

'Dan, you're never out of the papers. Your column, we used to love that. And then your books and all the trouble you get into. You're the closest thing Groomsport will ever have to a celebrity.'