Gods Without Men (4 page)

If only Anouk was around.

One day Nicky thought of a lyric:

It felt like the beginning of something. Noah was hunched over a four-track in a corner of the rehearsal room, chewing on his beard. When Nicky asked him what he thought, he just went
hmm
.

“What do you mean,
‘hmm’
?”

“Nothing. It’s just … Well, it kind of lacks bite.”

Nicky had always tried to act as if he could take criticism. The lyric was about a time when he and Anouk had been up for two days, speeding and ordering room service in a hotel in Berlin. Nookie was really tweaking, and he’d been on at Terry to get them some Valium. Despite how it sounded, it was sort of a happy memory.

There was an awkward silence. “OK,” said Noah eventually. “I’ll show
you what I mean. I think it needs something more, um,
striking
.” He walked up to the mike and sang:

“She’s not a little frog. I don’t think of her as a frog.”

“OK, man. Whatever. She could be, I don’t know, a squirrel.”

“Or a leech,” said Lol bitchily.

Nicky walked out. What else could he do? He stayed away for a couple of days, spent the time drinking with some lads who had a custom-car place in Venice. He reckoned he had Noah’s number. Geezer was third-generation hippie aristocracy. His grandparents ran some Hindu healing center up in Northern California, sort of like the place the Beatles went to. His dad had been a singer-songwriter who’d OD’d after one album. According to Noah, he used to live in a dome out in the desert, just jamming with his band and looking for UFOs. Once he played them the LP, which had a picture of a pyramid on the front and was called
The Guide Speaks
. It was rubbish. All the stuff which once seemed so amazing about Noah was basically just him being a chip off the old block. Nicky’s old man had given him a lot of solid information about Spurs and cavity-wall insulation. If he’d grown up doing Zen calligraphy and going on horse rides with Leonard Cohen, things might have been different.

He should have knocked it on the head after the night of the hot tub, should have got on a plane. They were over at Noah’s, and despite himself Nicky had managed to get into the swing of things. There was this bird Willow and they were in the hot tub with the bubbles on and he was just beginning to get to a place where Anouk was totally off his mind when Noah bounded up, stark bollock naked, brandishing a pistol. Willow made a little noise in her throat, scrambled out, and ran off to find her clothes.

“Now look what you did.”

“Fuck her, man. You and I need to talk.”

Noah leveled the gun, holding it with both hands like he was on a firing range. “It’s weird how it concentrates the mind. You can feel it, right? The prickly sensation on your forehead? Think: What would it be like if I actually got shot? All that mush spurting out. All my brains.”

“I’m not being funny, mate, but if you don’t put that down I’m going to ram your teeth down your throat.”

“I’m not being funny either,
mate
. I’m serious. See my serious face? I’m not happy, buddy. I think you and your band might be wasting my time. You might be wasting my fucking
life
. Do you actually want to make a record, or do you just want to smoke weed and ball chicks in my hot tub?”

“You’re off your nut.”

“Time for answers, Nicky. Clock’s ticking. Seems to me like you don’t have any ideas. Seems like you don’t have any
creativity
.”

Willow must have told the others, because at that point Earl ran up and wrestled Noah to the ground. Noah was furious, shouting about how he was filled with cosmic pulsating life and Nicky was sucking it out of him, but eventually Earl got the gun off him and persuaded him to go inside and have a lie-down. Terry offered to drive Nicky back to the hotel, but he didn’t want to talk to anyone. He drove himself, so high and freaked out that he was barely able to see the center line.

He rang Anouk. It went straight to voicemail.

That should have been him done, back to Dalston, kebab in hand, pack of Marlboro Lights, six Stellas for a fiver and L.A. just a bad dream fading in the rearview mirror. Turned out the bastards weren’t going to let him off so easy. The next day he got soothing calls from Terry and Earl and the record company and the management in London and a concert promoter in New York who had no business knowing anything about the situation at all. Then a courier arrived with a big cardboard box, supposedly from Noah but most probably from Earl, with a cowboy hat inside wrapped in tissue paper and a note saying Neil Young had been wearing it when he made up “The Needle and the Damage Done” and Nicky ought to have it, as he was the true inheritor of that spirit blah blah blah. Nicky didn’t like to be soft-soaped. Twelve hours in the air and he could be having a pint in The George on the Commercial
Road with the rain pissing down outside and some dickhead bending his ear about how Ronaldo wasn’t worth the money. Sheer bliss.

He told Terry he’d had enough and Terry did something he very rarely did, which was to sit him down and say no. Nicky reminded him it wasn’t his job to say no, his job was to say yes. Terry said he knew that, but sometimes what Nicky thought he wanted wasn’t what he actually wanted. The record company needed a record, and if they didn’t get one in L.A., they were going to consider the band in breach of contract. Fuck it, Nicky said. Breach the contract. We’ll go to another record company. Terry sighed. It didn’t work like that. A lot of money had been flushed down the toilet. He asked Nicky to imagine men in little cubicles doing sums. Men in suits. Nicky imagined. He didn’t see Terry’s point. Terry put it another way. If they didn’t make the album, the record company would take all their money. They’d be broke. Nicky asked if he had a choice. Not really, said Terry. Not having a choice was one of Nicky’s pet hates.

He finished his cigarette and ground it into the hot concrete of the studio car park. Make the record or be broke. Or steal Noah’s drugs and his gun, leave town and hope that by the time the others find you, it’ll all be sorted out. There was always a choice, if you knew where to look for it. He got into his car.

Driving was almost the only thing that felt natural in America. It was traditional. It was
patriotic
. When you accelerated, you could almost hear the crowd cheering you on. The Camaro managed about a hundred yards to the gallon and sounded like a tank invasion. It was a 1970s orange fireball of environmental doom and if he had to spend his globally warmed old age on a raft or trudging through the ruins of Billericay eating dog food, it would have been worth it.

L.A. faded away into a thankless dead landscape. You couldn’t call it desert, really. It was waste ground, the city’s backyard, a dump for all the ugly things it didn’t want to have to look at. Warehouses and processing plants. Pylons, pipelines. Broken things. Junk. There were whole junk towns, San this and San that, fuck all to them except concrete: concrete boxes to live in, concrete lots in front of concrete malls for all the little junk people to go and buy things. He was happy to pass through without
stopping, to see those places as blurs by the side of the highway. A water tower, a wall painted with the tiger crest of some high-school sports team. He didn’t care that his phone was ringing every few minutes. He didn’t care the radio had nothing on it but Bible preachers and dinner jazz. The road was white as a bone, the sky was airbrushed blue, and he was on his way to the emptiest square on the map. Nothing mattered except keeping it tight, slotting into a space between speeding cars, peeling off at a junction, swinging round and over and under and back, leaving disaster far behind.

How long did he drive for? Three, maybe four hours. The car didn’t have air-conditioning and the wind blasting through the open window was hot and gritty. His brain was starting to sizzle in his skull like an egg in a pan, so he pulled in at a petrol station, stuck another sixty dollars into the tank and bought a big jug of water, most of which he poured over his head. As his poor swollen gray cells relaxed back to their normal size, he looked at the phone. Eleven missed calls. Several from Terry, a couple from Jimmy, even one from Noah. He didn’t bother listening to the messages.

Whatever he was doing, it wasn’t about the band. The only person he wanted to hear from was Anouk. He willed the phone to ring again, for her number to appear on the screen.

Call me, babe.

Come and get me.

The gaps between the junk towns grew bigger. Soon the only signs of life were rows of giant white wind turbines and billboards advertising casino resorts. An outlet mall rose up at the roadside like a mirage. Then nothing. Miles of rock and scrubby bushes. Eventually the light began to fade. Sparks were darting about at the edges of his vision, little comets he kept mistaking for overtaking cars or bats flying towards the windscreen. He was coming into a town whose name he hadn’t caught when he saw a motel sign. There were dozens of these shabby places along the route. Desert this and palm that. This one was called the
Drop Inn
. He was too tired to go any farther.

Reception was no bigger than a cupboard, a little box with a desk, a bell, a rack of postcards and a clattering screen door. The woman who
emerged from the back room had bigger hair than he’d seen on a real person since he was thirteen and found his mum’s cache of eighties workout videos. She was wearing a purple jumpsuit, which might have been hot (or at least ironic) on a twenty-year-old, but on her it was sort of sad, an outfit fixed at the fashion moment when its wearer last felt beautiful. He couldn’t tell how old she was. Forty-five? Her mouth had little lines round it. When she wasn’t talking, it shaped itself into a tired grimace, as if she’d spent too much of her life saying things she didn’t mean.

She told him to call her Dawn and insisted on giving him the full tour. He said he was tired, hoping she’d just give him the room key, but she was having none of it. She chattered away as if he was the most exciting visitor she’d had in months (which might have been true), pointing out all the details, the “touches.” The “rec room” had a coffee machine, a shelf of dog-eared books and a board with takeaway menus pinned to it. Outside, the “landscaping” consisted of a few flowering bushes poking up out of the dust, sheltering some little plaster foxes and bunnies. All the animals were painted purple. The corrugated-iron fence which screened the kidney-shaped pool was purple too. So were the fraying covers on the loungers, the doors to the rooms and the tiles sunk into the dirt to make a border for the concrete paths. “We turn the spa pool on between five-thirty and ten,” she told him, as if this was information which might influence his decision to stay. He nodded, trying to keep his eyes open.

As Dawn demonstrated the spa pool’s various jets, he looked out beyond the peeling fence. It was hard to say where the motel property ended. It sort of petered out. Behind the pool was a shed and a couple of plastic lawn chairs lying on their sides in the dirt. Behind the chairs, the broken ground stretched away into the distance until it hit a line of barren hills, a jagged black outline against the evening sky. He wondered what it would be like to climb them. Impossible during the day. Scrambling, panting, the sun beating down. It would be a penance, a quick way to kill yourself.

“We don’t serve breakfast here,” said Dawn. “But you can get coffee in the rec room anytime you like.”

“Can I see my room now?”

“Sure.”

She didn’t move, just stood there, staring up at the sky, her arms folded across her chest as if she was suddenly feeling cold.

“You can see a lot out here,” she said eventually.

“The room?”

“Oh, pardon me. This way.”

Later he lay on a bed that stank of lavender-scented detergent, listening to the sound of cars going by on the highway. His body felt like lead. His stomach was growling and he had a headache. The room throbbed with purples of various shades and intensities. Mauve bedclothes, lilac carpet, violet curtains. It was like being trapped inside a bruise. He dozed for a while, the TV jabbering in the background, occasionally jolting him awake with canned laughter or sudden bursts of gunfire. He finally had to admit he wasn’t going to sleep until he’d eaten. He peeled himself up, put on his trainers and went to the office. The woman didn’t answer the bell. Eventually he found her out the back near the pool, sitting in one of the lawn chairs, peering up at the stars through a telescope.

“What are you looking at?”

“Oh, nothing in particular.”

He told her he wanted to get something to eat and asked where to go.

“There’s a diner just a mile or two down the road. You can’t miss it. It’s all lit up.”

He didn’t leave immediately. Her mouth hung open slightly as she screwed one eye against the telescope. She seemed tense, expectant. He had a sudden picture of what she might have looked like as a child. Happy, optimistic. She sensed him watching her and frowned.

“Tell me something,” she said. “Are you out here looking for lights?”

“No. Well, yeah, I suppose. Maybe. I’m just trying to get away from things, you know?”

She gave him an appraising look and turned back to the telescope. He went to get his car keys.

Driving into town, he passed a sign marking the turnoff for a Marine base. A grid of lights glowed in the distance, covering an area much bigger than the little strip of Main Street. A video shop, a 7-Eleven, an
off-license, a couple of bars. There was a barber offering “military and civilian haircuts” and a house with three neon signs in the front window, one saying
NAILS
, a second
MASSAGE
and a third offering
CHINESE FOOD
. The diner was easy enough to spot. Like Dawn said, it was lit up. She hadn’t mentioned that it was also built in the shape of a flying saucer. He parked outside and went through the door, up a little concrete ramp that had once been painted to look like metal. The UFO Diner had seen better days. Its curved plaster walls were cracked, and sections were dark in the band of red neon decorating the saucer’s rim. The leatherette booths and battered chrome stools must have been there for at least thirty years. On the walls were posters from sci-fi movies, faded by the sun to pastel blues and yellows. Darth Vader was a ghost, E.T. the faintest fetal outline. Nicky was shown to a table by a fat teenager who handed him a menu and went back to chatting up some lads who were hunched up in one of the booths. Five of them, tattoos, buzz cuts, all staring at him, and not in a good way. It was possible that lemon-yellow skinnies, a cutoff T-shirt and spray-painted eighties high-tops weren’t a look most residents favored out in San wherever the fuck this was.