One
Time enough for a proper shower then, before picking Evelyn up from the Morton Institute. This afternoon’s escapade was pretty squalid, even by Tristram’s standards. It happened in Whittlesford, a sleepy little village a few miles south of Cambridge, where everyone knew everyone and everything about them. And yet, somehow this woman was keeping the shenanigans under wraps. They didn’t speak at all. You didn’t unless it was about what you were doing. Names didn’t matter. Names were the worst thing you could bring into any conversation, if you actually had to have one. Names meant people, and this wasn’t about people, this was about whatever you had declared to the readers of the contact magazines was your thing. Two strangers who had the same thing could be guaranteed a splendid time without consequence – except maybe that of discovery, hence no names.
Tristram DeVere Whytt pulled up outside the thatched cottage with the blue door in his Citroen 2CV – the Ratmobile, as Evelyn called it. His sunglasses were a perfunctory nod in the general direction of disguise, but it didn’t matter. He wouldn’t be going back there and he didn’t care what her neighbours would say in the pub down the road, or in the Spar shop across the street, about the bloke with the shades and the rockabilly haircut and the Inspector Clouseau car.
His holdall was packed with goodies: the mauve peignoir with matching corset and pink stockings, black patent mules with fake ostrich feathers, the blonde wig, basic make-up, cold cream and cotton wool and The Intruder. There was no hiding The Intruder. It was always introduced up front and early, so that expectations could be set clearly and unequivocally. It was frighteningly large, it made a deafening buzz, and was always brought out for a spectacular finale. She had been visibly shocked when he took it from the holdall, but by the time he was ready for it any concerns about judgement were long dispelled. “I want to piss in your face,” she said, which he was fine with – this was her bed after all. She perked right up when she squatted over him and let go. A little at first, then the whole gush, right in there. As soon as she was finished he got on his hands and knees and begged for The Intruder and some really filthy encouragement, which was instantly forthcoming. This lady had a flair for commentary and insult, and he came much quicker than he had wanted to. He got the impression she was up for another round, but apart from being spent it was probably better to be out of there sooner rather than later. The traffic could be a bit dodgy and he needed to let Twizzle out and give him his dinner before picking Evelyn up.
They were going to work tonight. Evelyn had a new song almost finished – at least the lyrics were done and she had the keyboard part down. She had also arranged to borrow a Revox two-track from Crutchley, the AV bloke at the Morton Institute. It was heavy and she wasn’t about to splurge on Camtax, so Tristram was doing his bit. He would probably stay over at her flat that night and bring Twizzle with him. Evelyn loved Twizzle and Twizzle loved her, which was just as well because Tristram was relying on Twizzle to dominate all conversation in the car so that the subject of his day would slip to last place on the list of Things To Talk About.
Evelyn’s day was mind numbing. Two Japanese, three Arabs, one Italian, two Brazilians, a Mexican and a Ukrainian struggled abysmally with future real and unreal conditional conjugations, drowning in a mire of confusion about the differences between ‘if’ and ‘when’. Evelyn liked her students; they were cheerful and enthusiastic, but trying to explain the English language was hellish. It barely made sense to many native speakers and when she was pressed as to why a ‘k’ or ‘p’ or ‘l’ might be silent, she would snap like a parent at the end of her rope: “It just is, OK?” But the pay was excellent, and she could usually sock enough away between terms to augment the unemployment benefit to which she was entitled because she paid her taxes like everybody else and didn’t get a say in how much the government spent on things she disapproved of. The song they were going to work on tonight was called ‘Paper Dog’ and it was all about the sneering contempt shown by the bureaucratic running dogs at the DHSS towards the unemployed.
Tristram lugged the Revox towards the iron stairs leading to Evelyn’s basement flat in the house on Parkside. The early evening sun cast a shadow a hundred feet long of the spire of Our Lady and the English Martyrs Church across Parker’s Piece, the lamps at Reality Checkpoint flashed on, and Twizzle cocked his leg against the railings, narrowly missing Evelyn’s bike.
“Good boy Twizzle! Who’s mummy’s cleverest boy?” she sang. Twizzle swished his tail obligingly and scampered down the steps. “How was your day?” Evelyn asked. She had forgotten to say anything in the car so slipped it in now.
“Not bad, you know. Same old,” said Tristram. “You got microphones for this, didn’t you?”
“Yes, but I think we need to invest in some proper stage mikes. You need to take this a bit more seriously and get an SM 58. Crutchley says those are the best for going out live.” The put-down was routine and Tristram took it silently. He didn’t have a leg to stand on after the afternoon’s malarkey and silence was hands down the best option. As he picked his way down the steps he reminded himself, as much to shore himself up against the shame of the encounter in Whittlesford as the sting of Evelyn’s remark, that he was the one who had made an actual living playing fifties retro rock and roll, he had booked gigs from Harlow to Chelmsford to Bedford to St Neots to Bury St Edmunds to Norwich and every village in between, it was he who had actually led a working band. People in these parts knew Bobby and the Sox and he knew what an SM 58 was. But there was no need to berate Evelyn with any of this. She’d see what was what when they started gigging. He felt even better after doing a quick a mental calculation and concluding Evelyn’s sniping could reasonably be attributed to hormonal riot. She fumbled for her key and he let himself in the door, and off the hook.
Twizzle jumped onto Evelyn’s bed and scrambled the pillows into place while Tristram set up the Revox on a chair in the hallway next to Evelyn’s harmonium. It was an old Lindholm and had been in her family for years. She took charge of it when her mother and father separated and shipped it down from Leeds, paying more to move it than the instrument was worth. The stop knobs were porcelain with very intricate gold lettering and the oak casework featured some exquisite Art Nouveau carvings, but it weighed a ton and took three people and a dolly to move it anywhere. Tristram was working on a motorized platform powered by a recycled washing machine motor hooked up to a twelve-volt car battery and an inductor, and though Evelyn had started making noises about getting a synthesizer, for now the Lindholm and its signature sound formed the basis for the Baroque Rock concept that was the essence of The Grip.
‘Paper Dog’ was a three-chord, droning dirge. The riff around which the other instruments would play (whenever the people who played them arrived, which would happen once Tristram pulled his finger out and placed the ad in Melody Maker) was a whining arpeggio repeated endlessly and modulating back and forth between A and G minor. When he heard it the first time, Tristram suggested it sounded a little like a cross between an ice cream van and a police siren. It was actually meant as a compliment, but Evelyn told him to concentrate on singing in tune and dropping that ludicrous American accent. Tristram’s ability to hold a note and stay in tune was not what it should have been, considering he was the lead vocalist, but Evelyn circumnavigated this difficulty by making sure the lyrics, at least on ‘Paper Dog’, were staccato and rapid fire, a nifty trick which was in keeping with the sentiment of the song. ‘Paper Dog’ was driven by anger, frustration and genuine rage at the conditions that compelled Evelyn to write the song in the first place, conditions with which she was all too familiar. It was clear to anyone with half a brain that the Dole Office was the inevitable destination for helpless, underprivileged people who were forced into the rat race, a rat race driven by greed, unbridled ambition and the military industrial complex, and the runners in that pointless marathon, especially young people, were mostly unable or unwilling (and fair enough) to compete. And the scum who worked at the DHSS office were lackeys of the whole corrupt system, taking it upon themselves to judge the very people they were supposed to serve, with their sneering looks and Torquemada attitude. “Back again?” one of them said to Evelyn, weeks ago, between terms at The Morton Institute.
You are paper dog!
And you don’t frighten me!
You are paper dog!
And you don’t frighten me!
And your glass partition
Doesn’t cut you off
No your glass partition
Doesn’t cu-uu-uu-uu-ut-ut you off!
Evelyn had written the last line to be sung as a powerfully sustained legato over seven whole beats but Tristram couldn’t hold the notes for long enough without running out of breath or going badly sharp or flat, so the machine gun bark of cu-uu-uu-uu-ut-ut was enthusiastically incorporated. Tristram practised the move he would use once they were gigging in the full-length mirror at home, his long legs splayed menacingly apart and his arms shaking violently with the recoil of his imaginary Thompson submachine gun.
Tom Hopkins pedalled frantically across Midsummer Common. It would be getting light soon, but the house would still be asleep. As long as Harry didn’t bark or give him an insanely exuberant welcome he’d be able to sneak in without waking his parents and even get a couple of hours of sleep before going back across the common and catching the 7.45 from Drummer Street Bus Station out to Duxford and Geiger Chem, where he worked as a pipe fitter’s mate.
The frantic pedalling was driven by terror and the need to escape. Tom had ended up in bed with mad Janie Armstrong, one of the Eden Street ladies, a close-knit group of single mothers who lived on the small side street off Fitzroy Street. They were all in their late thirties, thoroughly middle class, well educated, underemployed if employed at all, and daily drinkers of too much wine at lunchtime. They seemed to have come together in the way that like attracts like everywhere, entirely by accident and with no apparent design. Tom’s tryst with Janie meant that he had now ended up sleeping with three of the Eden Street ladies – and very much by accident rather than by design.
At eighteen, Tom was buff but not overbuilt, sinewy and lithe but not bony, tall but not lanky. He had high, sculpted cheekbones, lusciously full lips, and his nose and jaw were as straight and proportioned as anything Michelangelo might have chiselled. His deep blue eyes, edged by enviably voluminous black lashes, were slightly cat shaped, with dramatically arched eyebrows that turned upwards just slightly as they trailed off onto his temples, making his face the subject of frequent double takes, sometimes stolen, often overt, occasionally accompanied by an open mouth, and in mad Janie Armstrong’s case the day Tom walked into the Elm Tree one Saturday night, by a dropped jaw and an exclamation: “Christ, you’re beautiful! Who on earth are you?”
By the time she ended up working behind the bar at the Elm Tree on Friday and Saturday nights, Janie was looking a bit ravaged, and was perilously close to the edge. Both her marriages were to men who ‘knocked her about a bit’, as she would sometimes admit, but only when they were piss drunk. One of them fathered Emily, who was diagnosed at two with severe autism. He knocked her about a bit more than her first husband and Janie’s social worker eventually got a restraining order against him, but not before he had broken two of her ribs. Janie was very good at hiding her despair. She wasn’t supposed to drink at all because she was prescribed ten milligrams of Valium twice daily, but three or four glasses of wine at lunchtime and the same with dinner, along with a heavy caking of Max Factor Number 7 foundation, skilfully applied mascara and carefully cultivated, boisterous bonhomie, fooled most people. Her figure was still svelte and she wore tight, white jeans, stilettos and sheer blouses, open just enough for something black and lacy to peek through. As she laughed and twirled and strutted behind the beer pumps and the old oak L-shaped bar at the Elm Tree, her troubles were invisible to anyone who didn’t know her. And like all the women Tom slept with, Janie had made herself unequivocally clear. As she handed him his beer and his change she slipped him a note that said, “I really want to fuck you.”
Tom wasn’t at all sure about having sex with Janie, especially when she told him she lived on Eden Street. Cilla Llewellyn-Jones and Pandora Findlay had seduced and then frightened him months before and he suspected there was some kind of pattern at work here. Tom frequently had sex with people he didn’t want to have sex with, simply because he felt guilty about rejecting them. Behind the guilt lurked his own abject terror of rejection, and behind that lurked his projection of that same fear onto others. The women Tom did want to sleep with were all hopelessly unavailable, but only because he was never able to summon up the nerve to speak to them, let alone ask them out. Even when he caught them looking at him over the tops of their glasses in the pubs of Cambridge, pubs that were heaving with bright, young transient things having the time of their lives, many of them eager for casual sex, he was terrified of making the first – or any – move. Once or twice, or even three times he had tried his luck and said a quiet ‘Hello’ as he squeezed past a pretty girl – they always knew they were pretty – on his way to the bar or the gents, and when the greeting went unnoticed or unreciprocated (part and parcel of a dance Tom found agonizing) he just gave up. Tom couldn’t woo, he couldn’t seduce, he couldn’t flirt and he couldn’t charm. He needed an unbroken series of very bright green lights in order to proceed, and even when he got them he crept forward with crippling trepidation, just in case they turned amber.
Tom arrived at Janie’s house, ostensibly for ‘dinner’, which had been two bottles of Chianti and a spliff. When they eventually made it up to bed, Tom discovered little Emily, now eight, was in there too, sprawled out sideways.
“Do you mind if she stays here?” said Janie. “I can’t move her now or she’ll never go back to sleep.” Tom said nothing as Janie scooped Emily over to one side of the bed. She stirred and started to kick. “Shhh … go to sleep ding-a-ling,” whispered Janie. Downstairs, the record player, stuck on repeat, played Clapton’s ‘Lay Down Sally’ over and over. After ten minutes, Emily settled, but Tom was a bag of nerves. Surely they weren’t going to have it off next to a sleeping child … Janie groped for his penis and found it flaccid and unresponsive.
“What a disgustingly small prick, you have!” Janie said. And then, very quietly, “Oh … I’m so sorry … that was a terrible thing to say. Actually, I wouldn’t be surprised if you wanted to hit me for saying something like that.” Emily flailed her legs and groaned. Tom’s heart lurched. Eden Street, he thought. He gulped and got up.
“Maybe we should do this another time, you know, when she’s not …”
“Here? She’s always bloody here. Welcome to my ding-a-ling world, Tom. Now fuck me, for Christ’s sake.”
And somehow Tom did. He came as quickly as he could, burying his face in Janie’s pillow and mustering up a reliable fantasy about Mrs De Angelis, the pottery teacher at his secondary school who once flashed a glimpse of stocking top and suspender as she wrote, “I must obey all the school rules, whether I agree with them or not,” on the blackboard. She had kept Tom behind for smoking behind the bike sheds and he was, apart from Mrs De Angelis, the only person in the classroom. Tom wrote out the command two hundred times and tried often to steal a glance at her legs as she crossed and uncrossed them under her desk, but there was nothing more forthcoming. He always wondered whether this little tableau had been staged for his benefit, and replays of that afternoon in his mind’s eye, aided by the very real possibility of his theory about Mrs D’s motives being correct, produced instant erections and shuddering orgasms. The routine didn’t fail him this night. As soon as he was done he climbed out of bed and hopped into his jeans. Janie squealed.
“Where are you going? I want another fuck!”
Tom said he had to be at work early and would see Janie that night in the Elm Tree, if she was working. It was the last time he ever saw her and the Elm Tree would now be forever out of bounds.
The streetlights were all off on Aylestone Road as he pedalled off the footbridge by the Fort St George. The dark was deep and the faint glow of a landing light in somebody’s house here or there did little to help, but Tom found his way to the garden gate of his parents’ house with practised ease, groped for the spare keys in the rain gutter of the shed and let himself in silently. Harry grunted and bashed the side of his bed with his tail. Tom knelt down, scrunched his ears and said “Shh … Shhh …” It was 4.47 according to the clock on the microwave. That would mean an hour’s sleep if he was lucky. Balls, thought Tom, and decided to call in sick the next day.
