Take No Prisoners (11 page)

Snare

Every year – for, let's see, it must be fourteen years now – on the 17th of September he's made a solitary pilgrimage down to the river, and this year is no exception. And, again as always, you'll be going with him.

He's married now, of course. His wife's a sales executive for Wellington & Sons, where he's second in charge of the accounts department – the friendliest accounts department in the English South West, as they like to boast to their trainee recruits. He wasn't much more than that – a recruit – when the dashing Miss Thomas, rising star in sales, the secret torrid dream of the spots-and-lunchtime-sandwiches-in-clingfilm brigade, staggered the offices by announcing that henceforth she and young Mr. Doremus in accounts were to be considered as an item. David himself could hardly believe his luck: perhaps Carol was a groupie manqué, or something, with a penchant for retired minor members of unsuccessful Seventies rock bands; the thought occurred to him the first time she allowed him to undress her, and it came near to unmanning him. But she went through with the wedding, and until the kid was rising two, by which time it was too late, the sleekness of her body and the size of her salary distracted his attention from the fact that he didn't like her very much.

Mr. and Mrs. Doremus live in a converted Georgian house in the right part of Exeter in a state of perfect connubial contentment. They have sex once a month because, as she puts it, that's often enough for anyone. She drives the kid to school each term-time morning in the Volvo and then, stereo blaring, carries straight on to Wellington & Sons to get stuck into work early, as she always has. He takes things a little more slowly, pottering about the house for a half-hour, making himself one cheese and one peanut-butter sandwich for lunch before traveling in on the minibus to start work at 9.29-and-not-a-moment-later.

Except that once a year, on the 17th of September, he takes a day's leave – or, when it falls at a weekend, is phoned by a friend who's just passing through and wants to talk about the old days over a pint – and goes down to the river.

No Carol. No kid.

He goes on his own.

Except for you.

There's a precise ritual that he follows. Today, like last year, the year before, and the year before that, he waits until he's certain that Carol and the kid have really gone, and then he reaches to the very back of the tools drawer, trying not to get stray tacks under his fingernails as he scrabbles around looking for the C90. He pulls it out and blows twelve months' dust from the box; then he fastidiously wipes off the stickier grunge and the desiccated moth with a couple of sheets of peach-colored toilet tissue and flushes the grimy package down the apricot lavatory, watching as it's sucked away with an expensively near-silent gurgle. The ball-point writing on the cassette's insert has faded into brownness now, of course, but that doesn't matter because he knows exactly what it reads. He smiles at it sadly – hello, too-old friend – and stuffs it into the right-hand front pocket of his least uncomfortable trousers.

Finding the Walkman inevitably takes a while longer, because the kid borrows it most of the time. Finally he discovers it in the Lego box; he puts Madonna to one side and hums to himself – homespun biofeedback – as he untangles the earpiece flex from the uprights of Barbie's en-suite dressing-table. The batteries are dead, of course, so he leaves everything where it is and pops along the road to the corner shop to buy a fresh packet of four, two of which he puts into the machine and two of which he sets to one side to be lost. He tests the player, pressing the button so that the little red light comes on and the spindles turn; he doesn't put in the C90 yet, of course, because he still has to get lunch organized.

No sandwiches today.

The would-be model in the shop smiles at him and makes her engagement ring very obvious, so that he's reminded to look but not touch. Yes, he forgot – as every year he does – when he was in getting the batteries that he also wanted a single green apple and a large can of Carlsberg Special. She gives him a second admonitory flash of the ring and bends over to get the beer so that her tight jeans say "F.U." at him, except that he's discourteously forgotten that he's supposed to be looking-without-looking and is staring at the video-game in the corner instead. Back home he washes the apple carefully under the cold tap and dries it on a flannelette kitchen towel. Apple and can go into a Dingles carrier-bag; the Walkman is clipped to his belt; he throws on a brown leather jacket that Carol doesn't know he still has; he checks that he's put his change and his keys in the pocket without the hole; he checks that the snugly fitting windows and the back door are closed and locked, and that the cat-flap is swinging freely.

There are seven songs on the cassette. There were many more songs they sung than that, of course, but only seven were ever recorded, the last of them in the drawing-room on a little mono portable.

At last, just as the two of you go out the front door, he pauses to put the C90 into the player. He fiddles with the flex and then sets the earpiece over his head. As his right hand gives the door a little shake to make sure that the lock's caught, his left reaches blindly for the play button.

It's only about a hundred and fifty yards to the bus stop, but if he dawdles along the way the first track will last just exactly long enough.

~

there's a place just down the road

where they're selling souls in celluloid –

you know, the kind that your mother used to make.

they're bribing girls in pinafores

to stand half-naked in the doors

of cars that use more petrol than a starving child can take ...

~

It was a joke song, of course, made up for a joke band in the back of a joke pub (ye-olde-leatherette-and-die-stamped-horse-brasses) by Alyss and me when we were pissed and giggling. The Satin Shirts – that was us – had just finished yet another bloody gig for another bloody bunch of rat-arses. We'd sung the usual mixture of Beatles and Stones standards, plus a couple of Engelbert Humperdincks for the mums; anything more modern was unpopular with the punters. The four of us had been bored as hell. As usual no one had noticed that our performance was as flat as a sheet of cardboard – flatter, in fact, because earlier Alyss, peckish, had absent-mindedly eaten the banana she'd been supposed to toy with languorously during our rendering of "Satisfaction." Satisfied in the warmth of a bad job badly done, we were in the process of drinking our fee.

Everything as usual.

Chris and Bri were off fighting with the scrum at the bar to get the next round.

Not everything. Alyss was letting me hold her hand; maybe she just hadn't noticed that I was.

She was laughing about something that I'd said, and then she stopped. With her free hand she began to draw a pattern in the spilled beer on the veneered table, her long black fingernail (she was very into black nail-varnish at the time) moving with a quick precision that wasn't reflected in her voice.

"What do we do it for, Dave?" she said, quietly enough that I had to lean forward to hear her. There was a sheen of sweat on her face but she managed to smell like talcum powder.

"What do you mean?"

"This." Hand taken out of mine. A sweep of the arm to embrace a hundred purple faces. Hand dumbfoundingly returned to mine. "The Exeter pub circuit isn't exactly paved with gold, is it? No need to fret about whether the latest platinum disc would look better in the sitting-room or the hall, is there? We're playing shit for shits and getting paid shit."

Alyss swore quite often, but it was always a surprise when she did.

"We have fun," I said, shrugging. "The money's not much, but it helps pay the bills, lets us have a good night out ..."

"Yeah," she said, her yellow-green eyes suddenly focused, suddenly filling mine, "and that's all there is to it. In a few years' time we'll all have our degrees and our secure, regular jobs – except me, because I'll have 2.4 babies and be
married to
rather than doing a secure, regular job like you guys – and if people ask us over the cocktails if we're into music we'll tell them that we like a bit of everything and not say that at university we bumped out our grants by setting Mantovani to music for the benefit of the wives and girlfriends of the Duke of York's Darts B Team. God. The Satin Shirts. Even the name makes me want to puke."

"Well ..." I said, looking on the bright side. After a couple of silences I said it again: "Well."

"Don't pay any attention to me, Dave," she said. "It's the Guinness talking. I've just got into one of my what's-it-all-for? moods, that's all."

There wasn't a lot I could say. Luckily Chris and Bri came back with the drinks a few moments later, so I could drink instead of think. Alyss's hand was gone from mine, now; it was resting in her lap, the fist tight clenched so that her knuckles were red blotches against the paper-white of her fingers. She didn't say much, even when Bri started doing his Sherlock Holmes act and joshing her about the Case of the Missing Banana. She looked at me a couple of times, and her eyes made mine sad-feeling. Maybe I was wrong to think she was doing any more than glancing in my direction.

"Alyss's a bit low because she thinks we should be looking for something better than pub gigs," I said when there was a space to say it in.

Bri began to laugh but Chris, more perceptive, looked at me earnestly, then at her, then back at me, then nodded, telling me to carry on. So I said the gist of what Alyss had been saying and then I began to expand on it, because the words I was speaking were persuading
me
as well, so that now I was on her side. After I'd finished, none of us said very much for a bit. Alyss had both hands curled in her lap now, and she was watching the fingers flex and unflex. Chris was staring at his half-empty pint. Bri was smiling, bright and cheerful, sitting on his hands and looking backwards and forwards around our faces.

"Look," he said eventually, "there's crap and crap, you know. We play good honest crap – everybody knows it's crap, including us, and everybody's happy, because that's all they want." He took a couple of slugs of his Strongbow and then sucked his upper lip briefly to get rid of the fizz. "You come down to the boozer on a Friday night, you don't want to have to stretch your brain too much: you're looking for crap, and that's exactly what the Satin Shirts serve up for you. OK. The Satin Shirts are doing a good job – Purveyors of Good Honest Crap by Appointment to Her Majesty kind of thing. No shame in that. But ninety per cent of the bands in the charts aren't doing that: they're supplying
bad
crap,
dis
honest crap. Why? Because it's pretending to be something better than it is – maybe the bands even believe it themselves. Certainly the kids do. A bunch of prat-heads hire a synth that plays itself, call themselves – oh, I dunno – the Flaming Goolies or something, sing a song about teenage angst and the unreliability of underarm deodorants and whazzo! They've got a hit on their hands, the wrinklies shake their heads and call for Peregrine Worsthorne, Robin Denselow tells us in the
Grauniad
that it's the voice of a new generation, and the kids have another Statement, another Testament. Day after tomorrow it's a different band and no one remembers the – what was it? – yeah, Flaming Goolies any longer but the Flaming Goolies don't mind because they've earned enough to live in the Bahamas for the rest of their lives. That's what I mean by
dis
honest crap. Everyone's deceiving everyone else; they don't give a fuck that they're deceiving themselves, too. Deceiving themselves all the way to the bank."

Chris swirled the rest of his bitter around in the bottom of his glass.

"I like the name," he said at last.

"What d'you mean?"

"'The Flaming Goolies.'" He grinned suddenly, digging out his roll-up tin. "Only you'd want to give it a touch of class, you know. Spell the 'Goolies' bit g-h-o-u-l-i-e-s, so it'd be a cunning pun, like."

Alyss's face was getting animated, too, as if she'd suddenly decided to throw off her moroseness like winter mittens – to hell with whether her hands got cold, this was the official proclamation that spring had started. "We'd all have to have new names, too," she said. "I mean, 'Alyss Henderson' doesn't have much of a pelvic thrust to it, does it?"

The green eyes had melted.

Within half an hour a new band was born. Yeah, lessavverbighan, ladles and jellyspoons, for

THE FLAMING GHOULIES

line-up

Fallopia Green (lead vocals and banana)

Crotchy Thumbstrangler (lead guitar, synth and vocals)

Buster Blancmange (bass guitar, axe and vocals)

Dave "The Beast" Dormouse (drummer, inaudible backing vocals)

I was the lucky one, I guess, because I didn't even have to change my name. If your surname's Doremus (my father reckoned Sinclair Lewis must have been sleeping with a distant relation of ours when he was writing
It Can't Happen Here
) it's pretty obvious what people're going to call you. Chris – sorry, Crotchy – told me that it was my job to write the songs, because drummers always wrote really crap songs unless they were called Kevin Godley, which I wasn't, and the Ghoulies needed nothing but the crappiest, so I said fine, my fee was only a couple of pints, guv'nor, and Alyss said she'd help me with the lyrics.

While Crotchy and Buster – see, I got it right this time – were up at the bar again getting my fee, Alyss and I set to work with a felt-tip pen and the blank pages at the back of her White/Handler/Smith
Principles of Biochemistry
. We sat side-by-side on the tackily upholstered bench so that her shoulder rubbed warmly against mine through the various layers of cloth between us.

Crap we were able to manage, all right – a few pints and that's easy enough. Buster had told us to make it good and pretentious, too, and that was a bit more difficult until Alyss remembered "Windmills of Your Mind" and began to hum it. We weren't quite able to match it, but we came pretty close with "Hill Snow and the Day of Peace." Call it my talent for titles. Alyss put an arm round me and kissed me on the nose when I thought of it, and her breath smelt of beer and warmth, and her eyes were speaking to me because there were only the two of us, you see, in the little cocoon we were spinning with the lyrics.