The Singer (48 page)

I no longer felt like the resentful
child who had woken up in his old bed on Saturday morning, though. I felt that I had learned something valuable after all, this weekend. Perhaps, for the first time, I actually felt like an adult.

Someone had left a newspaper lying on the seat beside me, a
Camden New Journal
at that. They must have been making their escape in the opposite direction to me.

The headline was a welcome home all
right:
Camden Now Officially UK Murder Capital
. I picked it up, sighing, wondering what fresh horrors awaited. The first sentence pointed out that the ‘Murder Mile’ began at Camden Town tube, right where I was headed next.

But before I could take in the gory details, my mobile buzzed in my pocket.

It was Ray and he had promising news. Absent-mindedly, I stuffed the newspaper into my bag and
forgot all about it.

February 1981

Lynton put down the battered paperback book on the table in front of him and rubbed his eyes. Outside, Route 78 seemed to stretch forever into the Georgia night. Inside the steel juggernaut that was transporting them from Atlanta to Birmingham, Alabama, the atmosphere was close: sticky with humidity and festering bad vibes. Lynton had a dread feeling that things would
be coming to a head soon, that Birmingham would be the place to make it happen.

For the past two weeks, everything had been getting steadily worse. This tour had started under a black cloud; the three of them returning from extended exile in Hull full of apprehension. Vince had turned up for their London rehearsals with a mooneyed Sylvana clamped to his arm and it soon became apparent that she
wasn’t going to move very much further.

Lynton had cringed at the sight of her. He couldn’t believe that he had entertained ideas about her himself, that he had actually gone to that party on New Year’s Eve even thinking that he might get lucky. It seemed like it had happened to another person,
another lifetime ago. Now she was the last person anyone wanted around.

Even Kevin had been uncommonly
hostile towards her. Lynton had expected Steve to blank her; he’d made no secret of what he thought about it all, he was seething with resentment for their sudden state of disarray. But Lynton had never seen Kevin cut another person dead like that before, ever. Kevin, who would sign a hundred autographs after a gig, who would uncomplainingly talk to the most moronic admirer long after everyone
else had left and then selflessly clear up everyone else’s mess, seemed to have become the worm that turned.

When Sylvana shyly offered him her hand he’d looked straight through her and walked past, so she was left standing there, red in the face. She stayed out of the rehearsal rooms after that, but Vince wouldn’t take a hint. Or maybe he saw it as a declaration of war. He was determined that
as far as the American tour went, she was going with them. A constant reminder of events everyone else would have far rather forgotten.

When Vince left the studios at night, he went back to the posh hotel she was keeping him in. The rest of them either kipped down on mattresses on the floor, or made do with any sofas that were on offer at friends’ houses. Usually that meant Lynton and Kevin reprised
their original roles of sleeping guard over the equipment while Steve went off to get bladdered – only in much unhappier circumstances than in their original tour van.

They still didn’t have anywhere proper to live, despite Tony’s incessant promises that they would be sorted soon. His words and his demeanour rang hollower to them by the day. As if they had already tacitly admitted that things
were nearing an end, none of them had brought much back from Hull after New Year. Apart from their equipment, they were surviving on the bare essentials.

Rehearsals had not gone well. They’d all walked around each other like cats with their hackles up, waiting to see who’d make the first move. It was hard enough to go back to the stuff they
knew off by heart, let alone revisit the new material
they had been working on just before Christmas. The chief mind game was spinning out between Vince and Steve. Both of them kept deliberately fucking things up whenever a song was starting to reach coherence, each of them testing the other out to see how far this piss-takery would go. No one exploded, but the screw was tightened every day, and every night Steve started drinking earlier. The clock
was ticking on a walking timebomb.

As they flew out over the Atlantic, a journey that should have been so full of hope and excitement, the three of them sat separate from the lovebirds, under their mutual black cloud. Lynton still could hardly bear to look at Sylvana; nor could he entirely discredit the nagging feeling that somehow he had brought all of this upon them in the first place, by opening
his mouth about finding her attractive within Vince’s earshot. Hadn’t he learned a long time since that anything you admitted you wanted Vince would do his utmost to get for himself? Was it too ridiculous to think that he’d only married this woman to piss Lynton off? Had he been imagining the way Vince had slyly winked at him when he’d said: ‘You’ve met my wife before, haven’t you?’

It gave him
a headache thinking about it, and that was another thing. Lynton seemed to have had a headache ever since they arrived in America and the stultifying atmosphere on the bus right now wasn’t doing anything to help it. It was the same headache as the one he’d come round with after Donna KO’d him; a dull, throbbing tattoo down the left side of his temple and inside his eye socket. He knew the brain
scans he’d had at the hospital had all come back clear, but Lynton was also secretly worried that he’d been done some permanent damage that night, something that the doctors couldn’t see. Because this headache was unlike anything he’d experienced before.

On top of all that, America didn’t seem to be taking kindly to Blood Truth. The best night so far had been the first one in New
York, where
they’d managed to sell out the legendary CBGBs – something that had lifted their spirits no end. Until they actually got there and realised that CBGBs was about the same size as the Hull Adelphi and hardly much more salubrious than that little pub. Still, all the city’s punks seemed to have turned out for them and, with the charged atmosphere that already existed between the four of them acting like
a lightning conductor, their set had been blistering.

Old songs mangled into new shapes, while the most recent ones suddenly took on the new, urgent life they had refused to find in rehearsals. The magic of their being together took over from their individual discomfort and the crowd felt its charge, rode on it. Up on that tiny stage with the condensation flooding down the graffitied walls in
danger of electrocuting the lot of them, Lynton had felt truly alive again. Afterwards, he had stood open-mouthed in amazement as not one but two Ramones came up to offer their congratulations.

He and Steve had ended up at some wild party on the Lower East Side that night, being offered every form of vice that the Big Bad Apple had to offer. In the high of the moment, they had managed to convince
themselves that maybe everything would be all right.

They’d been allowed one day to rest and recover after that gig, then they’d been gathered together by the young guy Tony had sent with them to be their tour manager, an executive posing as a positive punk who spelt his name ‘Nik’ and attempted to dress the way the band did. Only he made such fundamental errors as wearing their T-shirts to their
gigs, under the pinstriped suit jacket and skinny jeans he thought made him look the part, with a fluorescent pink skinny tie knotted round his neck and worse still, matching fluorescent pink plastic winklepickers. Nik was full of the genuine enthusiasm of one who had no idea of what he was letting himself in for.

They were slightly more heartened to make the acquaintance of
their driver for
the next month, Earl, and his gigantic articulated rig. They’d never seen a lorry so big or so gleaming as this mobile Silver Bullet, as Steve immediately christened it; it certainly put the British standard tour coach to shame. Inside it had bunks at the back and a lounge in the front, with its own fridge and a Hi Fi that looked like it had been designed by NASA. With a roadie from New York, a young
Italian American who looked like Travis Bickle and rejoiced in the name of Mouse, in the middle of a hailstorm, they started their journey across the badlands.

The novelty of the coach’s luxuries began to fade when they slowly realised that, for the next month, they’d be spending about fifteen hours a day confined in it, with only a couple of overnight motel stays on the way. Just as the novelties
of the truck stops with their bizarre novelty shopping items – replica route signs; glow-in-the-dark Jesus pendants;
Real Truckers’
tapes; fundamentalist preacher stickers; and the hornet-coloured tablets called Stingers that were like legalised speed for roadhogs – began to pale next to the sour looks and muttered comments of the folk inside them.

Outside New York, to the rest of America, they
were a travelling freak show.

The further south they went, the more Lynton had the unnerving sensation they were moving back in time, into a world of swamp and cotton and white clapboard churches that had forever been hostile to a man with black skin. A world his jazz heroes had told him all about was now prickling at the core of him, almost as if his own blood was singing him a warning. Maybe
it was; maybe his ancestors had toiled in servitude in similar lands, fashioning the music that kept their souls alive even as they broke their backs labouring. He wouldn’t ever know. But he
felt
. And it seemed his instincts were quickening. Earl, who himself looked like a bowlegged cowboy with a drooping moustache and a black Stetson parked firmly on the back of his head, seemed to stay closer
by his side when they got out to stretch their legs and eat. He didn’t say anything, but Lynton just knew he was watching his back.

He stared at the back of Earl’s head now, at the neck thick with muscle and the long black ponytail that snaked out of the Stetson and ran halfway down his back. At the jaw that stoically chewed tobacco in time to the Hank Williams tape he listened to as he drove.
Lynton had never particularly liked country music before, but Hank’s lonesome keening had lodged itself permanently in his brain, as haunted and lost as the landscape they travelled through. It mingled there with Billie Holliday’s lament of strange fruit, hanging from the trees. He realised he was drinking almost as much as Steve now, although it didn’t seem to afford him the respite that was coming
in loud snores from behind him.

Washington DC was the last place where Lynton had felt safe. That had been a mainly student gig with a fairly polite audience, all with white faces, he noted. Their playing had not quite been touched by the quicksilver magic of New York that night, but it was still enjoyable enough for them to forget their differences for the duration.

But since then…

Baltimore,
the venue half empty. Norfolk, Virginia mainly hostile stares and indifference, just a handful of the local weirdos making a show of themselves in front of the stage. Steve disappearing with a couple of girls afterwards, a nervous, two-hour wait for him to get back on the bus, Nik pacing and wondering if he hadn’t been mugged down some dark alley, infecting the rest of them with his fretful agitation.
Steve eventually turning up arseholed, singing ‘The Irish Rover’, something that freaked him out when Lynton tried to joke about it the next day, because Steve couldn’t remember any of it and worse than that, it was his Da’s favourite song.

Tonight’s gig, left four hours ago in Atlanta, had been heavier going still. Two good old boys had parked themselves right in front of Lynton, giving him
knowing winks and then making gestures as if they were jerking a rope around their necks. At one time, Vince would have picked up on this, would have been
down off the stage sorting them out in a second. But Vince didn’t seem like he was entirely on the same stage as the rest of them. Vince was glassy-eyed and mumbling his words, tearing off his shirt and then falling over. The first beer cans
had started coming their way at that point, gathering momentum as Vince staggered back to his feet and flapped his arms, shouting vague, incoherent threats. Steve had saved the day by catching a full one as it flew in an arc towards his head, then, without missing a beat, bowling it straight back over-arm to his attacker. That had raised a cheer, bought them a bit more time. Steve had seized it,
deftly segueing the hideous non-version of ‘The Crooked Mile’ they’d been demolishing into the viperous opening chords of ‘Grumble’ and then, as if this ancient routine had awoken Vince from his narcotic haze, they had pulled it all back from the brink.

It was only during those fraught few minutes between disaster and redemption, when Steve searched out Lynton’s eyes for support, that he had
finally noticed the Dukes of Hazzard down there. In an instant, he had come over to Lynton’s side of the stage to grind his Les Paul at them from his sweaty leather crotch, with his top lip curled and an expression of pure psychosis in his eyes. Pulling expressions of disgust, they’d moved away, but Lynton could still feel his heart hammering all the way out of the venue. In the car park, Earl was
lounging by the bus, idly swinging a metal baseball bat.
As if he had known
.

Lynton couldn’t stop his eyes from darting around the darkened lot, couldn’t stop his hands from shaking until he was safely back on the bus and they were on the highway out of town.

Then it had gone into what was becoming their routine. Vince and Sylvana went immediately into the bunks at the back of the bus. Nik counted
the money, doled out the PDs, put everything else in his little safe box and then retired with it clutched to his chest. Sometimes he’d try and stay up drinking with the rest of them, or sit up front and bother Earl, but not tonight. Lynton, Steve
and Kevin sat around in the front with Mouse, who, as usual, was spilling over with enthusiasm to recount his Tall Tales of CBGBs.