Take No Prisoners (13 page)

What I couldn't get over – still can't – is the way that Fallopia and the two guys could carry on afterwards living in apparent perfect amity as if they'd never been anything other than good friends who happened to live in the same house. It wouldn't have been possible for me to act that way. To me, lovemaking involves the complete disrobing of the soul, the unveiling of one's innermost self so that no blemish, no failing, is left uncovered. When you're making love with someone you're allowing yourself to be seen completely without pretension; you're saying to the person you're with: "Look, I trust you enough to see me totally raw. Will
you
trust
me
that much?"

Don't get me wrong. I'm not necessarily talking about love and devotion here. Well, love maybe. I could quite understand Fallopia having enough love-of-friendship for Buster that the two of them could trust each other sufficiently to be soul-naked together – and, anyway, Buster was so fucked up then that he was soul-naked in front of everyone, all the time, so the sex part of it must have been purely a technicality, a symbol of the everyday reality. But it's the afterwards that baffled me. I could have come to grips with it if he and Fallopia had thereafter become sort of brother-sister close, or even if they'd been occasional lovers when one or other of them needed the comfort; but instead they were just back to the way they always had been, good buddies, nothing special, a whose-turn-is-it-to-go-to-the-launderette-type relationship – as if they'd both suffered some kind of joint amnesia. And the same went for Crotchy and Fallopia.

I was alone in the house one afternoon when Jaques phoned up. He was in a call-box, as usual, so the first thing I did was jot down his number and ring him back.

Great news, great news! As always when he was excited it was a bit hard to work out exactly what the great news
was
, but I made myself appropriately jubilant anyway and then tried to worm it out of him.

Actually, as news goes it really wasn't bad.

Some pinstripe from Floozy Records plc (Jaques was quite meticulous about including the "plc" every time he mentioned the company, and later the rest of us got into the habit, too) had been driving back home from his hols in Cornwall with the wife and kids, and had caught a bit of Devonair while passing through. One of the DJs had stuck on "Hill Snow" as a golden oldie – six months is a long time in the pop biz – and the pinstripe had rather liked it. Liked it enough to phone Devonair on the Monday to get the details; liked it enough to get Jaques to sell him a copy (possibly a unique experience for our youthful tycoon); liked it enough to start making noises about it being time for us to take the next step toward (yawn) stardom ...

The following few weeks were hell, and the direct cause of the fact that I don't have a degree. Because I was the band swot, I was regarded as the one most likely to sail through the finals without further work being needed, and so I was selected to go through all the business mill. I got us an agent in faraway, exotic Bristol – Hawkeye Poulton – and he negotiated a contract for us with Floozy Records plc on terms that were so favorable to us that we only ever saw about ten per cent of what we earned. I went up to London a handful of times to have my hand bathed in the pinstripe's moist grasp and get taken to L'Escargot. I agreed the dates when we could go into the studio to recut "Hill Snow" and "Wall" as well as a couple of further tracks that Alyss and I would write. I did everything for the Flaming Ghoulies that needed doing, because the other three just didn't have the time; I tried to keep my own studies up to date as well, of course, but it simply wasn't possible.

"I Got Socks" was a nice song. Once again Alyss caught that strange happy-sad emotion in the lyrics. Some of the kids might just be perceptive enough to read into them what was actually there, but I doubted it; I tried to help them by way of the melody, which was another very delicate one. When I listen to the track now it reminds me a bit of early Kate Bush (say, maybe we're where she got her ideas from) except that Alyss's voice was different – sort of like a virginal Chrissie Hynde might have sounded.

Fallopia and Jaques got something together for a while during my absences, I gather, but it wasn't anything serious.

~

It's a short walk between the two stops in the High Street, but the two of you negotiate it easily enough, Dave dodging among the fixed-eye shoppers and the pebbledash litterbins and the benches. And all of this he manages even though he's temporarily blind. There's nothing in the earphones at the moment, of course; he hears the pedestrians trailing their feet along the pavement and the straining of the minibuses as they trudge away from their stops as a single white noise.

Anyone looking cursorily at him now as he leans against the stop would think he was either drunk or had been up all night. But someone who peered into his half-closed eyes would see that instead it is a matter of his body being empty: his entity has retreated far behind them into some secret place known only to him. There, he is hearing the echoes of a long-stilled voice and the sounds of lilting music; he's seeing the lights, some of them quick-dazzling and others muted; there's the touch of many hands on his body, fingers tugging at him ...

You – the only one, perhaps, who could join him in that place – choose, by contrast, to drag him out of it. Running yourself down his arm, you make his fingers twitch, then move towards the Walkman's solid box. There should surely be time for him to play the next song before his minibus comes. It's a short song not just in terms of the number of minutes and seconds it lasts; it's the one track that, in the course of his annual pilgrimage, he plays only because it's there on the tape, because it needs to be played if he's going to get from the previous track to the next.

Forcing his fingers to clasp themselves around the Walkman is more difficult – for the first time since the pair of you rose this morning, you feel yourself consciously having to undergo some exertion – but soon they respond to your urging. Then his thumb presses down on the play button and, as the preparatory hiss returns to his ears, his self eases itself back into his body, uniting him once more, like a caveman returned to his cave.

~

and when your bloke has left you

and you're feelin' all bereft'n'you

've discovered that you're out of booze'n'cigs,

don't let your hopes go flaccid

or drown yourself in acid –

there's no need to leave it tacit:

just yell "PIG"

~

I haven't any idea how many palms had to be greased along the way, but somehow the publicity people at Floozy Records plc who'd promised us
Top of the Pops
or at the very least
Old Grey Whistle Test
managed to book us in for a slot on some late-night variety show on Harlech that none of us had ever seen. It was the first time any of us had ever been on television except Brian, who'd inadvertently been A Small Boy Passing By in a commercial when he'd been six, and we were naturally very excited. The Floozy Records plc people had supplied us with some new gear to play – they said it would come out of the royalties of our next disc (or platter, as Hawkeye quaintly described it over the telephone to me); a sign of their optimism was that the pick-shield on Chris's guitar was peeling off at one corner and had to be glued back in place. The other three were too cool to show it – the excitement, I mean – but I know that I was embarrassing. I even phoned my mum. The person who really blew his mind was Jaques. Exactly what his financial position now was
vis-à-vis
ourselves I had then and still have no idea – presumably he was getting some kind of a backhander from good old Hawkeye – but you'd have thought he'd just found the Crown Jewels on his doorstep. Of course, he insisted on coming with us in the van up to Bristol, sitting on the broad front seat between Brian, who was driving, and Alyss, who clearly didn't much like him sitting that scrunched up against her; you could tell it from the too-easy way she laughed at the rather coarse jokes he told as we belted along the motorway. Besides, that close to him she must have had two nostrilsful of his odor the whole journey: he wasn't a great one for bathing, was our Jaques.

Although the program wasn't to be going on air until half-past eleven, we had to get to the Harlech studios by early afternoon. When we arrived, a little late through having got stuck in Bristol's one-way system for a while, none of us had eaten. To be frank, I don't think I'd have been able to – I was knotted up inside by a mixture of exhilaration at the fact we were making it into the big(gish) time and a dread certainty that something was going to go terribly wrong, like a foot through one of the drums – but the others, excepting Alyss, were making a great song and dance about it. Hawkeye appeared from a crack in the wall and told us that we'd have a chance to grab something in the canteen later on, but to shut up for now.

We were met by
Laugh? – I Could Have Pissed Myself!
's producer, who looked about twenty years older than I'd expected: not at all the type of person you'd think of as running a show packed with alternative comedians. Those were the early days of alternative comedy, when everybody was still getting used to the idea that jokes about tits and bums and bollocks were ideologically sound and acceptable to the radical chic, not just sexist crap like they used to be. It's a style of humor I've always felt uneasy with, guilt smothering laughter, glancing at the half-open door to worry that my parents might be standing outside it, waiting to pounce.

Nicholas – the producer, and not a Nick – ushered us and our equipment down a confusing selection of brightly lit corridors, pausing to exchange words every now and then with people he didn't introduce us to. Finally we were into the studio itself, where that evening's live edition of
Laugh? – I Could Have Pissed Myself!
was going to be presented before an invited audience of a couple of hundred. None of the other artistes had arrived by then: we were the only ones who'd be rehearsing there all afternoon. Nicholas told us this was because it didn't really matter if the alternative comedians screwed up their acts because that was what the audience expected of them – all part of the fun – but the musical interlude was a different thing. Actually, he went on to unnecessarily explain to us, it didn't really matter all that much if we screwed up as well, because we were the bit of the program when the audience at home hopped off for a pee if they couldn't hold out until the ad break, but he had a certain professional pride. I think he was just winding us up, though; I think the point was that the camera crew wanted to get their angles sorted out – zeroing in on Crotchy's nimble fingers or Fallopia's jeans, that sort of thing.

The rehearsals were tedious.

We'd written a special song for the occasion, Alyss and I, so we could be more in keeping with the spirit of the rest of the show. I didn't rate it too highly, and I don't think even Alyss was very fond of her own lyrics after the effects of the Spanish red she'd drunk to write them had worn off. Unlike our other songs – even "Hill Snow" – "Pig" had nothing at all behind the words and the music: it was just a jolly bellow, something you could hear a couple of times and then be annoyed about, years later, when it popped back unexpectedly into your head.

Nicholas didn't like it very much either. We were only halfway through the second verse – because of the way they were working, it took us about an hour and a half to get that far – when he began shouting that we should be doing something else. Him and Hawkeye went into a huddle, from which we could hear nothing but grunts, so we ended up playing "Hill Snow" that night because it was the only one of our songs that Nicholas had heard before.

The audience was about the same as the ones we'd got used to when playing pub gigs, only bigger. There was about the same distribution of ages, and about the same lack of real interest in and expectation of the fare that was being presented in front of them. They laughed at all the jokes they were supposed to laugh at, which was more than we did, standing waiting with the less famous comedians in a small soundproofed room at the rear, watching and listening to the whole horrendous palaver on a small color television set in the corner. There was a fridge in one of the other corners stocked with beers and miniatures, and all of the comics plus Fallopia and Crotchy laid into it with a will; I told her she was being foolish, what with this being a big opportunity for us and all, but she was too overwhelmed by nerves to listen and just snapped another ring-pull.

And then it was the time for us to be lugged on stage, just before the second commercial break ("They run the song and the break together," Crotchy whispered, "just in case it's a crap the folks at home want"), trying not to make any noise because there was one of the comedians at the far side of the stage, spotlit, still going through his patter to the delirious yells of the mob. I felt as if we were the next load of Christians just about to be shovelled into the arena after a spectacularly good gladiatorial contest, and wondered why still nothing had gone wrong with the gear. A couple of technicians bustled around us, plugging little black insectile mikes onto and into our instruments and our bodies. I adjusted the spiral-winding stool they'd supplied me with until it was the right height – someone must have been fiddling with it since we'd finished rehearsals, I guess, but at the time I reckoned it was that I must have got smaller while waiting in the anteroom.

Then I was swallowed up in light and noise, alone except for the moving silhouettes of Fallopia and Crotchy and Buster in front of me.

She'd forgotten her banana, of course. I'd known something would go wrong. But I only realized that later, when all of us – the comics and Hawkeye and us, the Flaming Ghoulies, and Jake and the production guys and even Nicholas were getting thoroughly pissed at Harlech's expense. It didn't cost them much, in our case, because we were halfway high already on the experience of having done the gig, and anyway we'd never had the chance to find the canteen. I hit the crudités and the mixed nuts for as long as they lasted, and tried to make sure Fallopia ate some of them as well, but she was glistening with sweat and the flattery of one of the alternative comedians – who was apparently very famous for his shock of frizzy hair, but he's forgotten now – and she didn't pay me too much attention.