The Alternative Hero (35 page)

This arrived two days ago. Since then I’ve done very little but stare at it and wonder what the hell he could possibly be on about. I haven’t shown anyone. Even Alan. Actually make that
particularly
Alan. The tone of deathly seriousness makes me feel very peculiar every time I look at it, like someone’s thrown a handful of rice down the back of my T-shirt. Yesterday the reason why occurred to me: it’s like Lance himself is speaking to me, Clive, for the very first time. Today I realised it’s not
like
at all. It
is
.

Other things have changed since Webster’s departure: some good, some bad, some significant, some irrelevant. It’s become summer (good). I’ve started a temporary job of quite breathtaking banality (bad), but the pay is decent (good), so there is a tiny shaft of light at the end of the overdraft tunnel. Alan, awkward bastard that he is, has suddenly decided to take an avid interest in the whole Webster thing, ringing me up on a twice-daily basis with a new theory (“You know what, man, I reckon he
knew
it was you all along and was just
winding you up”), or to ask if there’ve been any “updates.” The only update I know of is that Webster’s flat has been put on the market. Occasionally I see an estate agent taking people in there. Last weekend I saw the smaller of the two roadies (was it Malcolm?) coming down the outside steps with a large cardboard box; he glared at me, so I glared back. No sign of Webster himself.

Until the arrival of Webster’s email, the most significant thing that’s happened—although not directly connected to the Webster saga—is that Billy Flushing has been in touch again. He sent me a breezy text message earlier this week saying he was in town, and would I like to go for “brunch on Sunday”? Picturing a sunny, pleasantly busy pub, Bloody Marys, a stout fry-up and some fit waitresses, I immediately replied in the affirmative; but then was a little perturbed to receive a call from his PA on Friday giving me details of a members’ club in Soho where the dress code is “smart casual” (ye gods). So now I am in my work trousers, black trainers, an acceptable-looking pink shirt I found in a charity shop yesterday, and a blue jacket I’d forgotten I owned. I look pretty absurd and I’ve got the faintest notion that Billy is perhaps slyly punishing me for being such a dick at school. You know about most of this. You know about me “ditching the dweeb,” letting Alan steal Billy’s role both as my friend and as assistant editor of the
Peanut
. You do not yet know about Spike Island.

Perhaps it’s time you did.

Well, for a start, I’ve sort of misled you about something. Two things, actually. One is that the teenage Alan and I didn’t take any drugs. The second is that we didn’t go a bundle on any of the Manchester bands. Both these things are slightly untrue. Not that I am suddenly revealing we spent all the early nineties off our tits, wearing flares and fishing hats, listening to Northside and informing all and sundry we were “havin’ it”—but we did indulge in the occasional smoke and, increasingly, as the nineties wore on, pill. It all started at Spike Island.

Not at the gig, you understand. On the way home.

Having spent an underwhelming New Year’s Eve in the local pub vainly trying to convince some girls that our tonsils would be worth investigating, we spent the first few hours of 1990 stretched out in Alan’s parents’ copious lounge, where—having initially dismissed it as drippy, tuneless mush—we finally “got”
The Stone Roses
.

“This stuff isn’t so bad, man.”

“Yeah,” I replied. “You just have to chill out to it.”

We listened on, getting appropriately excited when everything
goes doolally at the end of “Resurrection,” then flipped over the disc and started again.

“What do you think about drugs?” Alan mused, munching a cream cracker.

“Not sure, really. Smoking doesn’t really appeal to me. I physically can’t do it.”

“Takes practice, man. But I was really thinking about the more chemical stuff. Speed … trips and so on. Ecstasy. I wouldn’t mind trying it sometime.”

“Yeah, maybe,” I replied. “It’d have to be the right occasion, I think.”

The right occasion presented itself when a month or so later The Stone Roses announced plans for their Spike Island gig. We ordered our tickets and spent the spring wondering how on earth we were going to get there. Despite the trouble we had getting back from The Heart Throbs gig in Harlow that April, we decided our budgets were too meagre for anything other than hitching. Alan’s dad gave us a lift to junction five of the M1 (the ridiculous sight of two indie oiks getting out of a spotless top-of-the-range Mercedes, then holding up a cardboard sign saying
YOUNG AND SKINT, IN SEARCH OF PARADISE—BUT SPIKE ISLAND, CHESHIRE, WILL DO MUST
have been a treat to anyone driving north at that moment). And there we waited, at eight o’clock on a thankfully dry May morning … for around two hours. At last an unmarked lorry stopped half a mile up the road and stuck its hazards on.

“Yer want Runcorn?” the driver yelled, once we’d reached earshot.

“Yeah, thereabouts!” I shouted back.

“Better check he means Runcorn, Cheshire, and not Runcorn, fucking Scotland,” Alan grumbled as we trotted the final few yards.

I opened the passenger door and smiled uneasily at our driver.
He was a short, stocky bloke in his fifties with grey hair and a red beard. He frowned at me and spoke in a breathless, prematurely irritated way.

“Yer getting in or not?”

“Er, yes, thanks, can I just check … you do mean Runcorn, Cheshire?”

“Yer know another one?”

“Ah, no. Thank you.”

It took us half an hour to fully realise he was drunk. Initially we just thought his truck was a bit dodgy—something about the wheel balance that kept sending us veering into the adjacent lanes—but soon the truck’s cab became sickly with booze fumes and he started taking large, obvious swigs from a hip flask. Finally he started to nod off. Alan and I exchanged worried glances, silently wondering if we’d live to see Birmingham, but just as we were passing Northampton a miracle occurred.

“I need a slash,” the driver spat, steering his lorry across two lanes to join the service station’s slip road. No indicators were involved in this action.

“Aw, shut the fuck up!” he bawled at the resulting fanfare of horns.

He parked in the services’ lorry zone and wordlessly dismounted. We waited until he’d rounded the corner, then scarpered across the picnic area into some bushes.

“Fuck,” I spluttered. “What a total nutter.”

“I knew it,” Alan stated, in his usual worldly tone. “As soon as he stopped so far up the motorway, I knew it was a bad idea.”

“Yeah, sure,” I nodded sarcastically.

We hung out in the bush for a few minutes, then saw him in the distance, staggering back. He jumped back into the cabin, manoeuvred the truck out of the space and drove off. The memory of picking us up had simply ceased to exist, consumed by cheap gin.

“Mad old bastard,” summarised Alan as we brushed ourselves off. “He’ll be dead soon.”

Temporarily putting the problem of onward transport to one side, we grabbed a burger. We were sitting on the wall outside the services’ shoddy main building, silently chewing in the sunshine, when I spied a familiar figure making his way through the car park.

Even from this distance we could see Billy Flushing had committed not one but two style crimes: he was wearing a Stone Roses T-shirt (never,
ever
wear the T-shirt of the band you’re actually going to see), and his hair was slightly longer at the back than it was at the front. Alan and I were dressed in black jeans and carefully selected Thieving Magpies T-shirts (mine from a recent tour, Alan’s from much earlier in their career, which I was naggingly jealous of), our hair shorn around the edges but deceptively floppy on top. We considered ourselves the epitome of alternative cool, which Billy fell some considerable distance from. That said, I didn’t think he looked quite as horrendous as usual (he had at least traded his black school shoes for some DMs)—a view Alan was unlikely to share.

“All right, guys?” he beamed.

“Hi, Billy,” I murmured. Alan looked away and began to moodily study one of the picnic tables.

“You’re not going to Spike Island too?” he gushed.

“Uh … yeah, we are,” I admitted, feeling there was no point in lying.

“Silly! You shoulda told me; we coulda shared the petrol. Ah, well. See you there,” he remarked, bobbing off into the cafeteria.

Alan and I remained silent for another minute, after which—very gently—I cleared my throat.

“Don’t even
think
about it,” Alan snapped.

“Oh, come on.”

“No.”

“Alan, it is already eleven o’clock …”

“I don’t care.”

“Even if we drove straight there, we wouldn’t be there before two.”

“I don’t care!”

“And for all we know, we might have to wait another couple of hours for someone to—”

“I don’t give a shit. I’m not arriving with that knob.”

“Well, we can drop you off and you can walk the last mile or something.”

“I’m amazed he can even fucking drive, man.” This, of course, was sour grapes.

“Yes, what was it you failed on?” I leered. “Parallel parking, was it?”

“Piss off.”

“Well, I think it’s bloody silly—he’s going
exactly
where we’re going. We don’t even need to hang around with him once we get there.”

“Too fucking right we don’t.”

Billy came bouncing out at this point, happily slurping a milk shake.

“Still here? Not hitching, are you?”

And so, two hours later—Alan sulking in the back of Billy’s orange Vauxhall Chevette, me chatting to the driver but keeping the conversation free of our former lunacy—we finally approached our destination in a queue of like-minded vehicles on the M56. Billy was impossible to shut up; so much so that I began to agree that Alan and I should cover the last few miles on foot (“I’d better get in there early, if you don’t mind, Billy—to set up my fanzine stall”). He was commendably frank about his reasons for attending the gig: “I’m not too keen on the band, but I’ve heard girls are easy when they’re on ecstasy”—which proved the only sentence of Billy’s to prompt the
slightest response from Alan (his then embryonic but now infamous sceptical belch-scoff).

The gig itself wasn’t up to much. That may seem something of a cop-out for what, in some circles, is seen as the crowning moment of Madchester, one nation under a groove, the pre-Britpop benchmark for what indie could achieve, and all that bollocks, but it just seemed like a lot of people hanging around to me. The weather was all right but the “support acts” consisted solely of tedious DJs; no one was remotely interested in the second issue of the
Peanut
(the five black splodges on the front were meant to be the Inspiral Carpets); and we couldn’t find any cider. Billy understandably assumed he’d be spending the rest of the day with us, which meant having to tolerate a grumpy, uncommunicative Alan. Even the famed ecstasy was unexpectedly hard to come by. When we finally found a suitable character bearing the inoffensive-looking beige pills at around half past seven, we painfully handed over thirty quid and waited for something to happen (Billy decided not to partake, knowing he’d be driving later). After an hour and a half the only detectable difference was I’d developed a headache and Alan claimed to be “hearing the bass more.”

The Roses came onstage at long last; we tried to push forward with our usual blend of rucking and going along with the “Mass Forward Movement,” but there really didn’t seem to
be
one. People were dancing but the only frenzied jumping up and down appeared to be taking place about half a mile in front of us. The sound kept getting blown around and was woefully quiet compared to the passable sound systems of earlier. During “Sally Cinnamon” I looked around at the darkening sky and reflected that this wasn’t really my scene. I longed to be back where the cider flowed freely and the bands crunched where the Roses drifted; the audience leapt, kicked and punched where this lot swayed and waved their hands noncommittally.
Everyone seemed relatively happy but I couldn’t really tell why. The band cantered to the end of their set and everything got slightly more exciting during an extended “Resurrection,” then a semi-decent firework display was unleashed and the show was all over, bar thirty thousand sweaty kids squeezing back over the bridge to the mainland. Alan, in an interesting turnaround, started to make noises about finding Billy (we’d lost him just before the band came on).

“Oh, so you like him now, do you?” I joked.

“Don’t be daft, man, I just can’t be arsed to hitch.”

We stepped out of the stream of exiting punters and waited by a fence to see if we could spot Billy. An older guy was already standing there holding a large camera and sucking on a cigarette. After standing there for a minute, Alan sighed loudly.

“Well, those tablets were a fucking success, weren’t they.”

I nodded. “Thirty quid down the drain.”

“Did you think the band were any good, man?”

“Nah.” I frowned. “Couldn’t hear a thing.”

“I’m gonna see if I can find some chips,” Alan announced, stomping off.

The camera guy turned round to me and smiled.

“Had a dud?” he asked.

“What?”

“Just heard your mate say you’d taken a ‘tablet.’ Hasn’t done you any fuckin’ good, has it?”

“I don’t think it’s my thing, really.”

“Bollocks,” he pronounced, puffing smoke in my face. “How long ago d’you take it?”

I looked at my watch.

“About three hours ago?”

“Rubbish. You’ve been conned.”

“You mean they were … ?”

“Duds, yeah. Fuckin’ corn flour or summat. Here, try these.”

He handed me another couple of pills, white this time.

“Oh, no—that’s okay, thanks,” I told him politely, as if he was offering me some sponge cake.