The Alternative Hero (32 page)

You stroll as casually as you can back up Hatton Garden, chewing over the prospect of health and colour returning to your bank balance, but lamenting the immediate shrinkage of your free daytime. It’s been a while since you’ve had a real nine-to-five; you gallingly recall how deadening a schedule it is, week in, week out. But hey. It’s only Tuesday. You’ve got almost a week before any potential job could start, and an hour before you’re due at Webster’s. It’s been a tough morning, but you’ve achieved everything on your list. And there, across Clerkenwell Road, as if by magic, is the Duke of York. And what’s the time? Midday.

On the dot.

Now, you’re fully aware that you’ve an afternoon of work, as defined by Mr. Geoffrey Webster, to get through: a collaborative and inventive burst of brainstorming for which full alertness and flowing creative juices are mandatory. But a quick pint won’t do any harm. On the contrary, given your previous record of being overanalytical, nervous and prone to weeping in public places, it’ll probably be just the ticket. You march in, order yourself a Stella and settle down by the window to watch the rainy traffic. They’re playing the first Killers album, so you cast aside the disappointing memory of seeing them live at Reading and enjoy the album for what it is.

The first few gulps are just as refreshing as you expect them to be, and by the time a text message appears at five past twelve you’ve had a whole half. Never mind, always the way: the second half will be slower. You glance at your phone. Alan, of course: “
HOWD IT GO
” (no punctuation as usual). You hammer out the good news; then, already feeling a positive rush from the alcohol (and “Everything
Will Be Alright” is the Killers song currently playing), you take a chance on adding the following:

You’ve decided this won’t be a problem. After all, how would Webster know Alan had driven from four suburbs away to accidentally bump into him? And Alan will hopefully behave himself—but even if he doesn’t, your brief friendship with Webster has just about run its course, with his impending departure to God knows where, so it won’t make an awful lot of difference if he thinks Alan’s a leering goon or, as Billy Flushing would have it, a dullard.

You take a few more gulps. Everything will be all right. You’re just wondering to what sort of horrendous job Mr. Brandish will send you when another text arrives.

Except it isn’t a text. It’s your phone telling you the battery’s running out. Shit! That was on the list too, giving it ten minutes on the charger! How could you have missed it? And this silly new phone of yours has a rubbish battery—two more of these alerts and it’s curtains. Pondering what to do about this, you drain your pint. Gah. The first pint is always so fast. But never mind.

The second pint will be slower.

By the time you’ve ordered it and returned to the window seat, your phone has spoken again. This time it really is a text.

Great will do what time roughly

No sooner has this appeared, it’s the low-battery noise once more. There’s no shutting this phone up. For the second time that day,
beads of sweat appear on your brow. It’s vital that Alan should know what time to arrive; you don’t want him getting there just as you’re ordering food ’cos he’ll have nothing to do for the next forty minutes, and it
will
look like the whole thing was planned. But right now you’ve no way of knowing what time to tell him. Damn! Why the hell didn’t you charge the battery? Angrily you snatch your to-do list from the bottom of your bag. How in God’s name did you … Sister. Sister! It’s all the fault of your sister! You were meant to ring her
after
you put your phone on charge, but she rang you and jumped the queue! So you missed the bit about checking your battery and …

… putting credit on your phone.

Now this is getting stupid. You were down to your last couple of quid last night, and since then you’ve made those stupid long phone calls. Never having grasped the finer points of your phone’s tariff system, you’ve no clue how much credit will be left, only that it won’t be much. You could call the service that tells you how much is left, but then the battery will instantly die.

Arse!

But there must be something good in this pint, for after your next sip comes a brainwave: the sort of thought that simply doesn’t occur very often in 2007, although ten years ago it would be obvious. You drain your pint, gather up your belongings, bid farewell to the barman and, feeling that usual extra bright daylight after a daytime pub stop, look up and down the road for a pay phone.

It’s years since you’ve had reason to be inside one of these things, and you haven’t missed them. Forty-pence minimum! You shove your pair of coins in the slot and wait as Alan’s phone rings … and rings. Voice mail. Actually, that’s better; you don’t have to waste time talking to him.

“Alan, it’s Clive. Um … listen, I’m not sure what time’s gonna be
best for later, and my bloody phone’s running low on credit and battery so what I’ll do is … I think I’m gonna have enough juice for
[bleep! bleep! bleep! bleep!
announces the accursed mobile as its final power courses through the circuit] … well, I’ll hopefully have enough juice for, like, a one-word message … y’know, after it’s had a rest, so I’ll just write the time you should get there. I should think it’ll be seven-ish, but we’ll see. All right? Later.”

Yet another rescue mission accomplished, you trot back over the road just in time to catch your bus. You climb to the top deck, where, apart from feeling a little dazed, prematurely knackered and slightly in need of a piss, you manage to enjoy the half-hour ride back to your home turf. You scoot round to your own street, ring the buzzer of 3A and shake the hand of the beaming former indie-rock icon who energetically swishes open his front door—but only then do you recall another, infinitely more important thing Alan should know before bowling happily into the boozer this evening.

“Hey!” exclaims Webster, chuckling slightly. “What’s with the suit, Alan?”

Bugger.

Considering the pair of pints (you realise that “have lunch” might also have been a good thing to write on the to-do list) and the maelstrom of worries churning around inside you all afternoon, you do pretty well at the Webster children’s-book workshop. Having bonded over toys, shrines and Belgian beer three days previously, frankness is forthcoming and ideas surprisingly plentiful. But every time Webster leaves the room to do anything—put the kettle on, visit the loo, make a phone call—you’re frantically working out how you can say what you need to say in the shortest possible text message before your phone bleeps its last:

Other lines of communication haven’t been written off: it’s a possibility that you could open up your email page on Webster’s computer, compose the appropriate message to Alan and send it before he reappears, but it’s risky. If the page locks up, he could return to find the name Clive Beresford slapped all over his screen, shortly before showing you the colour of his front door and reacquainting you with his roadie pals. Just about the only safe option is to announce you must suddenly pop home for something, giving you the chance to run to another pay phone—but what for, and why is it so urgent? You’d need an excuse—but imaginative resources run dangerously low when you’ve spent the last few hours trying to dream up catchphrases for a talking fly.

Inevitably, because of all this mental turmoil, you haven’t had much chance to properly take in your surroundings. You are, after all, inside Lance Webster’s flat; notes should be made, searching questions should be asked, a small amount of emotion should even be felt. But in truth, there’s not an awful lot to see. You’re working on a laptop in a comfortable but sparsely furnished front room; the kitchen is functional but hardly top of the range; there’s a paucity of gold discs, musical instruments or any other memorabilia that might suggest the abode of a pop star; there’s a flash-looking stereo but only a small rack of CDs. An indifferent ginger cat you’ve been warned not to approach—evidently the more vicious colleague of the recently departed Jessica—periodically prowls through the room.
You haven’t been offered “the grand tour” and you’re not completely comfortable asking for it, but the hospitality has been reasonable enough: tea, biscuits and even, at around four, a round of cheese and pickle sandwiches. But the distinct impression remains that you’ve purposely not been allowed into the real inner sanctum, the studio, where Geoff still occasionally becomes Lance. The only item you’ve seen that’s worthy of a second thought is a framed photograph, on the mantelpiece, of a male toddler.

The session starts winding down at around half past six. Webster is beside himself with joy at the afternoon’s achievements and you feign suitable amounts of enthusiasm and satisfaction, but you’re close to exhaustion, regretting every last millilitre of beer you consumed earlier in the day for both its mental and physical effects (you’ve had a pounding headache for the last two hours). Delightedly, Webster asks if you’re still up for “some grub,” to which you nod and smile. He dashes upstairs to “freshen up,” leaving you to contemplate your mobile phone and whether, in your hour of greatest need, it will be there for you.

You hold down the power button gingerly just as the ginger cat strolls into the room. You eye each other warily as the phone boots up. The first thing that happens is it makes the low-battery noise again. The cat doesn’t like this noise, flips back its ears and jumps onto the windowsill: an area Webster has spent a considerable portion of the afternoon trying to stop the cat reaching. You do your best to ignore its behaviour, racing to your “write message” function, but the cat is poking its nose through the open crack in the window. You quickly write your prerehearsed message (you’ve risked expanding it to “745 Web thinks my name is Alan sorry explain l8r”), scroll to Alan’s number (thank fuck his name begins with “A”) and press send just as the cat wins its grip on the bottom of the window and pushes it upwards to make good its escape.

“Lance!” you shout, running into the hall and halfway up the stairs. “Lance! Your cat’s trying to get out of the lounge window!”

In the silence that follows—as the name you have chosen to shout reverberates around your bewildered head—your phone bleeps to merrily announce its own untimely death and an upstairs door creaks open.

“Sorry,” Webster’s voice slowly articulates, “what was that you said?”

“I, er … I said … that your cat … is trying to escape … from the lounge window.”

Webster runs wordlessly past you down the stairs and rushes out the front door. Mercifully he appears a moment later holding the wretched animal, which he carries into the kitchen. He throws a handful of cat food into a bowl and leaves the room, shutting the door. He grabs a jacket from one of the coat hooks in the hall and then stops, looking straight at you with a hard, featureless stare that could mean a number of things. You reasonably decide it’s probably “What fucking name did you just call me, and why?”—so you respond with a look one might give a girlfriend if caught trying on her clothes.

After a few incredibly long seconds, your companion shakes himself out of his brief trance, announces brightly, “Come on, then—let’s do it,” grabs a batch of printouts from the day’s travails (“just in case we want to talk about it in the pub”) and you’re off towards the drinking hole of choice as if nothing has happened. You decide he’s either convinced himself he heard wrong, or surmised that you did indeed Google him after he told you the band name the other night. Either way, the banter is soon back up to speed, or as speedy as you can manage. Christ knows whether Alan received your text.

You feel slightly better as soon as the first drink is placed in front of you, your brain and body probably in limbo since the last one
some six and a half hours ago. The two of you chat about this and that, consider ordering food but decide to wait awhile. Webster is in his usual good mood but your own brain wanders easily; on more than one occasion in the next half an hour Webster asks you if you’re okay. The final time he asks, you apologise and slope off to the toilet.

Once inside, you splash some cold water on the gaunt, ill-looking face reflected in the mirror and decide, not for the first time, that enough is enough. You simply cannot keep doing this: living your life via a string of grey lies, all of which cascade into one another, leaving you with a perpetually impossible cleanup task. You must shape up, turn the leaf, cease the “harmless” lunchtime pints, get your shit together, be honest. Possibly even right now. With the much-lied-to alternative hero of yours, who waits on the other side of the wall.

But sadly none of this will be possible. Exactly as you initially felt his presence about a month ago, when you leave the gents’ and return to the pub’s main room you just
know
that Webster has vanished. You know, even before you see his jacket missing from the back of his chair, the pile of papers gone from the little table. The room simply feels Webster-less, before you’ve even rounded the corner. You approach the table, your new pint waiting (at least he had the decency to deliver it)—no trace of a drink for him. He’s not at the bar. Then you spot the thing. Your bag is slightly open. You look inside: perhaps a note? But nothing. Apart from your wallet, not zipped shut properly, one of the credit cards sticking out. A card that of course bears the name “Mr. C. Beresford.” Not “Mr. A. Potter”: that innocent, sensible name of a man who doesn’t go putting crazed, drunken notes through ex-pop stars’ front doors at two in the morning.

You sit down and instinctively clutch the pint glass in front of you. You consider crying, but no tears come (which isn’t an altogether bad thing—it would start to become a habit). You look up, frowning
hard, your eyes coming to rest on the clock behind the bar. Quarter to eight. Punctual as ever, Alan comes bursting through the door, swinging his car keys, glancing around the pub. He meets your eyes and comes bowling over. Nice that he’s tried to make it look accidental, just as you asked him to.