Stories we could tell

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1977 - LOVERS OF TODAY

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ONE

'One moment, sir. '

They stopped him as he was coming through customs. Why wouldn't they stop him? Terry looked like trouble.

His skin pale from too many sleepless nights and God knows what else, the second-hand suit jacket from Oxfam, the CBGB's T-shirt, Levi's that hadn't been touched by water since the day he bought them and wore them in the bath (his mother telling him he would catch his death, his father telling him he was bloody mental), Doctor Martens boots and - the crowning glory - his short, spiky hair dyed black, and badly, from a bottle of something called Deep Midnight that he had found at the bottom of the ladies' grooming counter in Boots.

Sir used like a weapon, like a joke. As if anyone would seriously call someone like Terry sir. Two customs men, one of them knocking on for thirty, with mutton chops and a mullet, like some King's Road footballer trying to keep up with the times, and the other one really prehistoric, maybe even as old as Terry's father, but lacking the old man's twinkle. 'Been far, sir?'

This from the elderly geezer, ramrod straight, all those years in uniform behind him.

3

'Berlin,' Terry said.

The younger one, as hairy as a character from Dickens, was already in Terry's plastic Puma kitbag, pulling out his God Save the Queen T-shirt, his silver tape recorder, a spare pack of batteries, a microphone and a change of Y-fronts.

As Terry's mum always pointed out, you never knew when you were going to get knocked over.

'Berlin? Must be lovely this time of year,' said muttonchops, and the old soldier sniggered. They thought they were funny. The Eric and Ernie of Terminal Three.

The old soldier flipped open Terry's thick blue passport and did a double take. The pale-faced, black-haired youth before him bore little resemblance to this incriminating snapshot from Terry's previous life, his mousey-haired and baggy-flared life, the living at home with Mum and Dad life, the working at the gin factory life when he walked around lost in dreams, and all his dreams were of getting out.

In the mug shot Terry peered out at the world from under a failed feather cut, trying to look like Rod Stewart but coming out more like Dave Hill of Slade. He even had the start of a suntan. It was a snapshot from when Terry was still waiting for his life to start, and his cheeks were burning as the old soldier closed the passport.

Then muttonchops was digging deeper in the kitbag, making Terry flinch now, because he was touching the things that really mattered to him, pulling out a two-week-old copy of The Paper with Joe Strummer on the cover, looking as beautiful and doomed as Laurence Harvey in Room at the Top. He flipped the big inky broadsheet open, gawped blankly at the news pages, at headlines that meant nothing to him.

This Year's Costello. Talking Head Cases. Bachman Turner Overdrive Disband. Muddy Waters - Hard Again. Fanny to Warm Up Reading? Quickly flicking through The Paper now. Not even glancing at the double-page centre-spread cover story on the Clash by Skip (ones, the greatest music writer in the world, but pausing - as if that's what it was all about! - when he got to the classifieds.

'Dirty Dick's Records - get yourself a dose', muttonchops read out loud, pulling a face. 'That's disgusting, that is.'

He tossed The Paper to one side and rummaged deeper, producing Terry's battered copy of The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Vlake Streamline Baby with entire paragraphs underlined, and then the truly irreplaceable - cassettes from Terry's recent interview with the legendary Dag Wood, the only man to be booed off stage at Woodstock.

Terry watched the priceless cassettes being handled as though they were something that they gave away with the petrol and he felt like telling the bastards to do something useful, like go and catch Carlos the Jackal.

But he thought that might be an invitation to a full body search, so he bit his lip, clenched his buttocks and wondered how long his girlfriend would wait for him. 'And was your trip business or pleasure, sir?' said the old soldier. 'I'm a journalist.'

It still gave him a kick to say that - nine months into the job and it gave him a thrill to see his name in a by-line, especially next to the postage-stamp picture you sometimes got. Small things, but they signified that Terry was becoming the someone he had always wanted to be. They couldn't stop him now.

A journalist?' said the man, a note of suspicion in his voice, as if a real journalist should be wearing a suit and tie, or carrying a briefcase, or old or something. 'What do you write about then?' Terry smiled at him.

It was the end of a summer day in 1977 and there was something in the air, and in the clubs, and pouring out of every radio. Everything was suddenly good again, the way it had been good ten years ago, back in the Sixties, when Terry was a child, and his parents still thought that the Beatles seemed like nice boys.

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What did he write about? He wrote about the way everything was changing. From haircuts to trousers, and all stops in between. What did he write about? Oh, that was a good one.

Terry thought of something that Ray Davies had said recently, about how he felt like sobbing his heart out whenever he looked at anyone's record collection, because it was just so moving to see that personal soundtrack laid out before you, naked and open and fading with the years, because if you cared about this kind of thing then it was all there among the scratched vinyl and the cracked gatefold sleeves, as plain as could be, all the hopes and yearnings of someone's private universe, and everything that a young heart could possibly want or need or yearn for. T write about music,' Terry said. Misty was waiting for him at the arrivals gate.

He saw her before she saw him. He liked it that way. It was one of his favourite things in the world - to see her before she saw him.

Misty. His honey-haired, cat-faced darling. Tall and slim in a simple white dress matched with a pair of clonking great biker boots.

Girls were starting to do that all the time, pairing something undeniably feminine - mini-skirts, fishnet tights, high heels, Misty's simple white dress - with something brutally male - DMs, spiked dog collars and wrist bands, Misty's motorcycle boots. Throwing their sex in your face, Terry thought, demanding to know what you were looking at, and silently asking you what you were going to do about it. It was a new thing.

Slung over her shoulder was a bag with her camera equipment. Dangling from one of the straps, where you might expect to find a little plastic gonk or perhaps a figurine of the Fonz or Han Solo, there was a pair of handcuffs - pink fake mink handcuffs. You couldn't tell at first glance if they came from a toyshop or a sex shop.

Misty and her pink fake mink handcuffs. Terry sighed at the sight of her. She was like a girl from a book. No, a woman - you couldn't say girl any more, that was another of the new things, it wasn't allowed to say girl, you had to say woman, even when they were still - technically, legally - girls. Misty had explained it all to Terry - it was something to do with what she called the suffocating tyranny of men. Funny that, thought Terry.

Yes, she was like the bird - woman - in the Thomas Hardy novel they read at school, the year he dropped out and went to work in the factory. Far from the Madding Crowd. Misty was like the woman in there - all female softness, but with a thread of steel you couldn't guess at by looking at her. Bathsheba Everdene. That was Misty. Bathsheba Everdene in a white dress and biker boots, Bathsheba Everdene with a pair of pink fake mink handcuffs.

She still hadn't seen him, and the sight of her face scanning the crowd full of strangers made his soul ache. Then she caught his gaze and started jumping up and down, so glad to see him again after being apart for so long. Over a week!

She ducked under a sign that said STRICTLY NO ENTRY and ran to him. She wasn't the kind who cared about signs, she moved through the world as if she had a right to be there - anywhere, everywhere. Like a woman in a book, like a girl in a song. 'Look, Tel,' she said.

She had the most recent copy of The Paper in her hands. Almost a week old, and somehow the ink was still damp, and her fingertips were black, and there on the cover was a gaunt, grim-faced man with platinum blond hair standing in a trench coat by a great wall with a sign that said, Achtung! Sie verlassen jetzt West Berlin.

Terry's story on Dag Wood, written on a hotel laundry bag and phoned in from Berlin.

'So what's he like?' Misty said, and he had to laugh, because normally the question drove him nuts. You wrote a 3,000-word piece about someone and then

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everybody asked you, What's he like then? What he was like was in the story, it was always in the story, or the story had failed. When Tom Wolfe wrote about Muhammad Ali, or Phil Spector, or Hugh Hefner, did people say, Yeah, Tom, but what are they really like? Probably. But Terry didn't mind. As it was her. As it was Misty. 'He's the greatest,' Terry said. 'I'll introduce you tonight, okay?' Then Misty had that look in her eye, that sleepy, faraway look, and she was tilting her head to one side, so Terry placed his mouth on her mouth, and felt her fingers running through his dyed black hair, and the cameras that were stuffed inside her shoulder bag pressed through his Oxfam jacket and against his heart.

Their kisses tasted of Marlboro and Juicy Fruit, and as they snogged at the arrivals gate, completely wrapped up in each other, oblivious to the smirks and stares and snide comments - 'What are that pair supposed to be dressed as, Dad?' - neither of them doubted that their kisses would taste that way for ever. Leon Peck was doing the singles.

He sat in the review room, the little corridor-shaped cubbyhole with a stereo where they went to listen to new music, and all around him were the week's releases, maybe a hundred or more seven-inch 45s, some of them in the new-fangled coloured vinyl and picture sleeves.

Convention demanded that Leon found something to rave about - The Single of the Week - and then picked twenty or thirty other singles that were worthy of a cheap joke that could be told in one pithy, piss-taking paragraph.

A kind of spiteful irreverence had always been a part of The Paper's appeal, and just under the tide of every issue the readers were promised, 'Hotsies, groovies, goldies and a rootin', tootin' tab of vicious controversy'. That was exactly what Leon needed to conjure up for his singles page. A rootin', tootin' tab of vicious controversy.

8

Except he couldn't be bothered.

Something had happened to Leon at the weekend that made 'agging off - let's see, what do we have here? - 'Float On' by the Floaters or 'Easy' by the Commodores or 'Silver Lady' by David 'Starsky' Soul - or was he 'Hutch'? - seem beneath him.

Something had happened at the weekend that had changed the way Leon looked at the world. So he picked up 'Silver Lady' -Starsky or Hutch grinning like a lobotomised Osmond on the picture sleeve - and flung it across the room like a Frisbee. The seven-inch slice of vinyl shattered with a satisfying, surprisingly loud crack against the far wall. It felt good.

So good in fact that Leon did the same with 'Float On'. And then 'Easy'. And then 'You Got What It Takes' by Showaddywaddy. Leon picked up 'Fanfare for the Common Man', the new single by Emerson, Lake and Palmer, and that was tossed with particular venom. Soon the review room was covered in shards of splintered vinyl.

Leon pushed back the stacks of singles and began leafing through the most recent issue of The Paper, sighing at the soul-shrivelling trivia of it all. Didn't these people know what was going on in the world?

There was Dag Wood on the cover, doing his tired old heroic-junkie routine by the Berlin Wall. Leon was pleased for Terry -could imagine him puffing up with pride at the sight of his story on the cover - but come on. As if Lou Reed hadn't done it all first and better! As if Dag Wood actually knew the difference between Karl Marx and Groucho!

Terry's such a sucker for all that rock-god schtick, Leon thought. They all are up here.

Leon yawned, and turned to page two, sighing at the sight of the charts. Mindless disco crud ruled the singles - Donna Summer faking multiple orgasms all over T Feel Love' - and, top of the albums, music to help tranked-out housewives hobble through the menopause. The Johnny Mathis Collection.

9

Leon snorted with derision. He flicked through The Paper, his fingers, like his mood, becoming blacker by the second.

Eater to record first album during school holidays… new singles by Pilot, Gentle Giant and the Roy Wood Band… new albums by Ry Cooder, Boney M and the Modern Lovers…

And then - finally! - at the bottom of page 11, jostled into a corner by a massive ad for Aerosmith at Reading and a world exclusive on the break-up of Steeleye Span, there were a few brief paragraphs that held Leon's interest and made his heart start pumping. The piece had his by-line. The National Front plan to parade through a black neighbourhood this coming weekend. Hiding their racist views behind an anti-mugging campaign and countless Union Jacks, the NF plan to leave from Clifton Rise, New Cross. Their route and the time of the march remain undisclosed.

A peaceful counter demonstration planned by local umbrella group the All Lewisham Campaign Against Racism and Fascism (ALCARAF) will assemble in Ladywell Fields, next to the British Rail Ladywell Station, at 11 a.m. Be there or he square.

The magazine had appeared on newsstands nationwide the previous Thursday, and in London as far back as last Wednesday. A lifetime away, thought Leon. Because last Saturday the march and the counter demonstration had combined to produce the biggest riot London had seen since the war. And Leon Peck had been there.

I was there, he thought, touching the bruise on his cheekbone where he had been clipped by the knee of a policeman on horseback. I saw it happen. While many of his peers were dreaming of seeing Aerosmith at Reading, Leon had been in the middle of the riot at Lewisham, crushed in with the protesters being forced back by the police and their horses, and he had felt as if the world was ending. Flags waving, bricks flying, policemen on horses riding into the crowds, the battle lines ebbing and flowing - screaming, righteous chaos all around. Orange smoke bombs on Lewisham High Street, the air full of masonry, dustbins, bottles and screams, taunts, chanting. The sound of plate-glass windows collapsing.

What he remembered most was the physical sensation of the riot, the way he experienced it in his blood and bones. His legs turning to water with terror as the air filled with missiles and the police spurred their horses into the crowd, his heart pumping at the sight of the loathing on the faces of the marchers, and the raging anger he felt at the sight of these bigots parading their racist views through a neighbourhood where almost everyone was black.

He had never felt so scared in his life. And yet there was never a place where he was so glad to be.

It mattered. It mattered more than anything. Leon Peck, child of peace and prosperity, had spent his Saturday afternoon doing what his father had done in Italy during the war, in Sicily and Monte Cassino and the march on Rome. Fighting Nazis.

Leon didn't kid himself. Lewisham had been one Saturday out of his life. It couldn't compare to what the old man had done in World War Two. But the experience had been like nothing he had ever known.

When he was younger than today, Leon had been involved in student politics at school and at university. But this was something else. The Pakistani shopkeeper at the end of the road where Leon was squatting had had his face opened up by a racist with a Stanley knife. The Nazis were coming back. It was really happening. And you either did something about it, or you went to see Aerosmith at Reading.

Later that sunny Saturday, just when the riot was starting to feel like one of those visions he'd had when he was dropping acid in the lecture halls of the London School of Economics, Leon had stopped outside an electrical shop on Oxford Street and watched the news on a dozen different TV sets. The riot was the first story.

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The only story. A quarter of the Metropolitan Police Force had been there, and they couldn't stop it.

Leon wondered if any of the readers of The Paper had gone to Lewisham because of his few measly paragraphs. He wondered if he had done any good. He wondered if soon the - he had to consult his own article here - the ALCARAF would be the name on everyone's lips. But then he turned the page and the classified ads brought him back to reality. This was what their readers were interested in. LOOK SCANDINAVIAN! Scandinavian-style clogs - Ј5.50… Cheesecloth shirts for Ј2.70 plus 20p postage and packing… Cotton Drill Loons. 'A good quality cotton drill in the original hip-fitting loons' Still only Ј2.60.

Leon's thoughts turned reluctantly to fashion, and he wondered, Who wears this crap? Leon himself looked like a shorthaired Ramone - a London spin on a New York archetype. A style that said - I am making an effort, but not much of one.

Leon's face and body had not quite caught up with the greasy machismo of his clothes. At twenty he was still whiplash thin, frail and boyish, looking as though he only had to shave about once a week.

His Lewis Leather biker's jacket sported a plastic badge on the lapel featuring the Jimmy Hill-like profile of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. He wore drainpipe Levi's, a threadbare Thin Lizzy T-shirt and white Adidas trainers with three blue stripes down the side. Pretty much the standard uniform for the enlightened urban male in the summer of 1977, although Leon had topped off his look with a trilby hat from a charity shop. Funnily enough, you couldn't buy that look in the back of The Paper, where they were still packaging what was left of the spirit of the Sixties. Cannabis leaf jewellery. Solid silver leaf pendant on real silver chain - Ј7. Leon closed The Paper, shaking his head. He adjusted his trilby. It was as if nothing had changed. It was as if there wasn't a war on.

It seemed to Leon that everyone he knew was living in some old Sixties dream. The people he worked with at The Paper, all of the readers, his father - especially his father, a man who had belonged to CND for a few years but who now belonged to a golf club.

What was wrong with them? Didn't they realise it was time to take a stand? What did they think the National Front was doing marching in South London? He touched the bruise on his cheek again, and wished it could stay there for ever.

This wasn't about some little style option - the choice between long hair or spiky, flared trousers or straight, Elvis or Johnny Rotten. It was about a more fundamental choice - not between the NF and the SWP, who were daubing their rival slogans all over the city, like the Sharks and Jets of political extremism - but the choice between evil, hatred, racism, xenophobia, bigotry, and everything that was their opposite. The memory of Lewisham still made him shake with fear. The rocks showering down on the marchers. The faces twisted with hatred. The police lashing out with truncheon, boot or knee. The sudden eruption of hand-to-hand fighting as marcher or demonstrator broke through the police lines, fists and feet flying. And the horses, shitting themselves with terror as they were driven into the protesters. Leon knew how those horses felt. Lewisham had been the first violence that he had been involved in since a fight in the playground at junior school. And he had lost that one. Mind you, Leon thought, she was a very big girl for nine. He thumbed through the singles until he found something worth playing. 'Pretty Vacant' by the Sex Pistols. He put the record on the turntable, placed the needle on the record, and pulled the arm back for repeat play. Then, as the stuttering guitar riff came pouring out of the speakers, he set about destroying the rest of

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the singles. The Jacksons, Donna Summer, Hot Chocolate, Carly Simon and the Brotherhood of Man - all of them were thrown to their doom across the review room, all of them perished in a dramatic explosion of vinyl.

Leon was about to launch Boney M's 'Ma Baker' when the door to the review room opened and standing there was an elderly black cleaner with a Hoover in his hands, staring open-mouthed at the destroyed vinyl that littered the carpet. 'What the goodness you doing in here, man?' the cleaner said.

'I'm doing the singles,' Leon said, his face burning with embarrassment. 'I was just about to clear all this up.'

Watched by the cleaner, Leon got down on his hands and knees and began picking up the smashed records, his mouth fixed in a smile that he hoped showed solidarity, and some sort of apology. 'I hope you like curry,' Terry's mum said to Misty. 'I love curry,' Misty said. 'In fact, my father was born in India.'

Terry shot her a look. He didn't know that Misty's dad had been born in India. It seemed there were a lot of things he didn't know about her, despite being together since Christmas.

Misty and Terry and his parents crowded awkwardly in the tiny hallway. Misty was making some rapturous speech about the glories of the Raj and something Kipling had written about the correct way to cook chicken tikka masala. Terry's parents smiled politely as she babbled on. His father took her photographer's bag. Terry noticed that she had undipped her pink fake mink handcuffs, and stuffed them in the bag. It was her first visit to his home and everyone was making an effort. Misty had turned the charm up to ten and Terry's dad had put his shirt on. Terry's mum had prepared a special menu and Terry hadn't brought any of his laundry home.

They entered the front room where an old film was blaring from the telly in the corner. For a moment it commanded all their attention. Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier were runaways from a chain gang, a white racist and a proud black man, still handcuffed together.

'The Defiant Ones,' said Terry's mum. 'He was lovely, Tony Curtis.'

Til turn that thing off,' said Terry's dad. That was a sure sign that royalty was visiting. They never turned the TV off until it told them to go to bed.

'What was it that Truffaut said about life before television?' Misty said, her lovely face frowning with concentration.

'I don't quite recall, dear,' said Terry's mum, as if she had been asked the name of Des O'Connor's last single, and it was on the tip of her tongue.

'Truffaut said that before television was invented, people stared at the fire.' Misty looked very serious, as she always did when relating the thoughts of one of her heroes. 'He said that there has always been this need for moving pictures.' They all thought about it for a while.

'Cocktail sausage?' said Terry's mum, holding out a plate of shrivelled chipolatas bristling with little sticks. 'Take two, love. They're only small.'

Terry thought it was so strange to see Misty parked on the brown three-piece suite in the front room of the pebbledash semi where he had grown up. When Terry was small, his father had worked at three jobs to get them out of rented accommodation above the butcher's shop and into a place of their own, but he knew that what was a dream home to his mum and dad must have seemed very modest to a girl like Misty.

There was flock wallpaper and an upright piano in the corner and a wall-to-wall orange carpet that looked like the aftermath of some terrible car crash. There were matching pouffes for them to put their feet up on while they were reading Reveille (Mum) and Reader's Digest (Dad). Misty perched on the middle cushion of what they called the settee in what they called the front room about to eat what they called their tea.

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Strange for all of them. Front room, settee, tea - it even felt like his parents spoke a different language to Misty.

Terry's dad stared bleary-eyed at the dead TV, a cocktail sausage on a stick forgotten in his hand. He had just woken up, and was getting ready for another night shift at Smithfield meat market. Even if he had been more awake, small talk wasn't really his thing, unless he was around people he had known for years, like the men at the market. But Terry's mum could have small talked for England. She busied herself in the kitchen, conversing with Misty through the serving hatch, like a sailor peering through a porthole.

T do like your frock,' Terry's mum said, her eyes running over the white dress and down to Misty's biker boots. 'It's a lovely frock.' She passed no comment on the biker boots. 'Would you like chicken or beef curry, love?'

Misty almost squealed with delight. T can't believe that you've gone to all this trouble!'

But Terry knew that the curry was no trouble at all. His mum would just drop the bag of Birds Eye curry in boiling water for fifteen minutes. He knew that wasn't the kind of curry that his girlfriend was expecting. He knew she was used to real Indian takeaways. Waiting for tea, Terry had the same sinking feeling, that preparation for humiliation, that he had once felt after PE in the junior school when Hairy Norton had hidden his trousers. Unable to locate his missing pair of grey shorts that were stuffed behind the urinal (thanks, Hairy) Terry had made the long walk into the classroom, fully dressed apart from his trousers. 'Please, miss…'

The rest had been drowned out by the mocking laughter of thirty eight-year-old children. That's how he felt waiting for his mother to serve them their curry. Like Hairy Norton had hidden his trousers in the toilets all over again. And the funny thing was his mum was a good cook. When Terry had been living at home, tea (Misty would have called it dinner) and Sunday dinner (Misty would have called it lunch) was always meat and two veg, with a nice roast on the Sabbath.

Apart from Sundays, the meal was always consumed in their favourite chairs, the toad in the hole or shepherd's pie or pork chops and their attendant soggy vegetables wolfed down in front of Are You Being Served?, or The World at War or Fawlty Towers or Nationwide or The Generation Game. 'Nice to see you, to see you - nice!'

But something had happened since Terry had left home. Now it was all convenience food -Vesta chicken supreme and rice, Birds Eye Taste of India, 'For mash get Smash' - spaceman food, dark powders or a solidified brown mass that required either the addition of or immersion in boiling water.

When Terry was a boy, his mum had baked bread, and it was the most wonderful taste in the world. The smell of a freshly baked loaf or rolls had made little Terry swoon. Now his mum no longer had time for all that business. Terry's dad blamed women's lib and Captain Birds Eye.

But his mum had pushed the boat out tonight, or at least as far as the boat would go in these modern times, and Terry loved her for it, even though it seemed he never had much of an appetite these days.

They sat themselves at the table that was usually reserved for Sundays and Christmas, paper napkins, folded into neat triangles, by best plates, the prawn cocktails in place. A bottle of Lambrusco had already been unscrewed. 'So you work at night,' Misty said to Terry's father. 'Just like us.'

Terry's dad shifted awkwardly in his seat, considering the prawn drowning in pink sauce on the end of his teaspoon. 'Hmmm,' he said. 'Night work. Working at night. Yes.'

'You hate it, don't you, the night work?' Terry's mum said, prompting him. 'He hates the night work,' she told Misty in a stage whisper.

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'Why's that then, Dad?' Terry said, rearranging his prawn cocktail with his teaspoon. His father had been working night shifts for as long as Terry could remember. It had never occurred to him that he would have preferred working during the day. 'Why do you hate working nights, Dad?'

The old man snorted. If you stirred him from his silence, he could be brutally frank. 'Because you're working when everyone else is asleep. And you're asleep when everyone else is awake. And then you get up when the day's gone, and you don't get cornflakes or a nice fry-up for your breakfast, you get prawns.'

He smiled at his wife with a mouthful of prawns, to draw the sting from his words and show her that he was grateful for her efforts. Misty smiled and nodded as if everything was wonderful. 'Salad, anyone?' said Terry's mum. 'Not for me,' said Terry. 'I'll have a bit of salad,' said Terry's dad. 'He likes his salad,' said Terry's mum.

Terry knew it wasn't real salad - he knew that what his parents called salad was really just tomatoes and cucumber and lettuce, with a radish or two chucked on top for special occasions, such as today. He knew that Misty would expect a salad to come with some sort of dressing. Vinaigrette or thousand island or olive oil or something. He knew this because joining The Paper had been a crash course in food and restaurant lore, as every press officer on every record label in Soho Square had rushed to buy the new boy lunch on their expense account, until they realised that he was going to slag off their rotten acts anyway.

But here was another thing he was learning about Misty. Salad dressing didn't matter as much to her as making his mum feel appreciated, and that touched his heart. By the time his girlfriend had pronounced his mother's boil-in-a-bag beef curry to be delicious, Terry was more deeply in love with her than ever, if that was possible. 'So how did you like Berlin, Tel?' his mum said, sinking a bread knife into a Black Forest gateau. If she had noticed that her son was only force-feeding himself enough to be polite, she gave no sign. 'It was incredible,' Terry said.

His mum waved the bread knife expansively. 'Lovely to go travelling all over the world and get paid for it. You were in Germany, weren't you?' she said to his dad. Terry realised that many of his mum's observations ended with a question to his dad, as if she was afraid the old man's natural reticence might mean he was left out of the conversation. 'Bit different in my day,' said Terry's dad. 'Why's that, Mr Warboys?' Misty asked.

Terry's dad grinned ruefully. 'Because some bugger was always shooting at me.'

Misty shook her head with wonder. 'You've had such an interesting life,' she said. She touched the hand of Terry's mum, the hand where she wore her engagement ring, her wedding ring and the eternity ring she had got last birthday. 'You both have. Depression… war… it's like you've lived through history.' She looked at Terry. 'What has our generation ever seen or done?'

Terry's parents stared at her. World war, global economic collapse - they thought that was all normal. 'Lump of gateau?' said Terry's mum.

They took their Black Forest gateau to the settee, and Misty perched herself on the piano stool, lifting the lid on the old upright.

'I had lessons for ten years,' she said. 'Five to fifteen. My mother was very keen for me to play.'

Terry smiled proudly. He had no idea she played piano. His smile began to fade as it became clear that she didn't, not really. ^Misty picked out the worst version of 'Chopsticks' that he had ever heard.

'Ten years?' Terry's dad chuckled with genuine amusement. 'I reckon you want your money back, love!'

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'I'm a bit rusty, it's true,' Misty smiled, seeing the funny side.

'Don't listen to him, darling,' said Terry's mum, and she sat next to Misty. 'Shove up a bit. Let me have a go.'

The piano had belonged to Terry's grandmother - his mum's mum, back in the days before television when every sprawling East End family had their own upright in the corner and a chicken run out back. You made your own entertainment and your own eggs. There wasn't really room for a piano in that little front room, but Terry's mum refused to get rid of it, especially now that Terry's nan was no longer around.

His mum cracked the bones in her fingers, smiling shyly, then began to play one of the old songs, about seeing your loved one's faults but staying with them anyway. She had the easy grace of the self-taught and she started singing in a soft, halting voice that made them all very still and quiet, although Terry's dad wore a knowing grin on his face. 'You may not be an angel Angels are so few…'

Terry's mum paused, but kept playing, and Terry's dad guffawed with delight.

'She's forgotten the words,' he said, embarrassed at his fierce pride in his wife and her gift. But she hadn't forgotten the words. 'But until the day that one comes along…' And here she gave a rueful look at Terry's dad. 'I'll string along with you.'

Misty stared at Terry's mum with an expression of total seriousness, as if she was in church, or in the presence of Traffaut saying something profound. Misty had once told Terry that she'd never tasted instant coffee until after she had left home. And he knew that his mum would end the dinner with coffee that came out of a jar from Nescafe. He also knew that his mum would probably add sugar and milk without asking Misty if she wanted any or not, the way you were supposed to, and he knew that someone was going to have to wash up those prawn cocktail teaspoons before they could stir their Nescafe.

But as he watched his girlfriend watching his mum pick out that old song, Terry felt for the first time that none of that stuff mattered very much. The train shook Ray Keeley awake.

He brushed a veil of long blond hair out of his bleary eyes and stared at the harvest fields, the scattering of farm houses, a couple of mangy horses. One hour to London, he thought.

Ray knew those fields, could read them like a clock. He even recognised the horses. He had been passing through this part of the country for three years, since he was fifteen years old, heading north to see bands on tour in Newcastle and Leicester, Manchester and Liverpool, Leeds and Glasgow, and then coming back to London to write about them.

He realised what had woken him. There were voices drifting through the carriage, loud and coarse, effing and blinding. A bunch of football fans were approaching, on their way to the dining car. At least they looked like football fans - long floppy feather cuts, short-sleeve shirts that were tighter than a coat of emulsion, and flared trousers that stopped some distance from their clunky boots. Feeling a familiar shiver of fear, he sunk deeper into his rock-hard British Rail seat, allowing his fringe to fall over his face, hoping to hide from the world.

Ray knew their type, and knew what they would make of him with his long hair, denim jacket, white jeans and cowboy boots. But they were more interested in finding lager than tormenting a

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lone hippy kid, and guffawed their way out of the far end of the carriage.

Ray closed his eyes. He didn't feel good. He couldn't remember sleeping last night, although he knew he must have at some point, because he couldn't remember when the woman had left his hotel room.

She was the press officer from the record company, there to make sure that Ray got into the shows and got to interview the lead singer while they were travelling from one town to the next. He liked her a lot - she looked a bit like the girl in Bouquet of Barbed Wire, and she knew her music. But Ray knew that the next time they met she would act as though nothing much had happened. That's what it was like. You were meant to take these things lightly.

He always felt a bit down coming off the road. You were tired. You were hungover. There was a ringing in your ears from seeing two shows and two sound checks in the last forty-eight hours. And there was always some girl you liked who would be somewhere else tonight. And of course you were going home.

The youths came back, swigging from cans of Carlsberg Special Brew, a few of them leering at Ray with amused belligerence. He stared out of the window, trying to control his breathing, feeling his heart pounding inside his denim jacket. They were everywhere these days. But they're nothing compared to my father, he thought. My father would kill them.

Then he must have fallen asleep again, because when he awoke the sun was low, and it took Ray one foggy moment to realise that the fields were gone, there were graffiti-stained walls all around and people were collecting their bags as the train pulled into Euston. 16th August 1977, and here comes the night.

TWO

As Misty steered her father's Ford Capri along the Westway towards the city, Terry laid his right hand lightly on her leg, feeling the warmth of her flesh through the white dress, idly wondering what their children would look like, and loving that little swoon of longing he got every time he looked at her.

Misty was nineteen years old - three years younger than Terry -and although they had grown up within a few miles of each other, he was aware they were from very different places. More like different planets than different parts of the London sprawl. Misty's family rode horses and Terry's family bet on them.

He was born in a rented room above a butcher's shop and she grew up in a house crammed with books, her childhood full of pony clubs and prep schools, her old man some sort of hotshot lawyer - that's where the money came from. She was a bit vague about it all, but then you had to be embarrassed about it now, privilege was nothing to boast about in the summer of 1977.

But she didn't need to spell it out. Terry knew they were different. She knew where she was going and he kept expecting to be sent back to where he had escaped from. It wasn't as bad as it had been at the beginning. It wasn't as bad as his first day at The Paper. But then nothing could ever be as bad as that.

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The memory of his humiliation could still make his face burn. Even now - with a girlfriend like Misty, with a friend like Dag Wood, with his latest story on the cover - the thought of that first day made him cringe.

This is how raw Terry was - he tried to return a review record. One of the older guys gave him a month-old album that nobody else was interested in, pointed him in the direction of the review room and left him to it. And when Terry had finished, when he had come up with his 300 smart-arse words on Be Bop Deluxe, he walked into the office where a few of the older guys sat, and he tried to give back the album. How they laughed! And how his face burned and burned.

He knew that one of the reasons he had been hired was because of the way he looked - that On the Waterfront thing that was back in style. The music wanted to be tough again. And there he was on his first morning, a Be Bop Deluxe record in his hand, his face all red and tears in his ears. He wouldn't have minded their amusement if they had been nothing to him, but these were writers he had admired for years. And they were laughing at him. They thought he was funny.

This was his dream job and it felt like he had just strolled into it. Desperate for new writers to cover the new music, The Paper had responded to Terry's carefully typed and Tipp-Exed reflections on Born to Run and a review of the Damned at the 100 Club (Bruce Springsteen and Rat Scabies - a nice combination of old and new school). They invited him into the office, where he met Kevin White, the ex-Mod editor who had practically invented The Paper, and White was quietly impressed that Terry had already seen some of the new bands live, and he liked the way Terry looked in his cheap leather jacket - luckily the interview was immediately after Terry had just pulled a night shift in the gin factory, so he looked fashionably knackered.

They hired him as a trainee journalist to cover this new music that was just starting to happen, this new music that none of the existing writers liked all that much or could even get a handle on. But getting the job turned out to be the easy bit.

Terry had once had a girlfriend who broke it off outside a Wimpy Bar, so he thought he knew about women. He had once smoked a joint that was more Rothman's King Size than Moroccan Red, so he thought he knew about drugs. And he had left school as soon as he could for a job in the local gin factory - a purely temporary measure until he became a world-famous writer -so he thought he knew about the real world. But Terry soon discovered that he knew nothing.

That terrible first day. He didn't know what to say - this young man who had always loved books, who had always loved words -it was as if he had lost the power of speech. He couldn't talk the way the older guys talked - the way they said everything with that never-ending cynical amusement, the ironic mocking edge that placed them above the rest of the world. Already he felt that he could write as well as any of them - apart from Skip Jones himself, obviously - but Terry didn't know the rules. How was he supposed to know you kept review copies? Until today he'd had to save up for any record he wanted.

It was like everyone else was speaking a language he didn't understand. He had a lot of catching up to do. Maybe too much. Maybe he would never catch up. And then he saw Misty's face for the very first time. And then he really knew that he was out of his depth.

One of the older guys parked Terry in the office he was to share with Leon Peck and Ray Keeley, the other young writers. Neither of them were there - Ray was at a Fleetwood Mac press conference somewhere in the West End, and Leon was on the road with Nils Lofgren. So while Terry waited for one of the older guys to find him something to do after finishing Be Bop Deluxe, he played with his typewriter, and looked in the drawers of his empty desk. And then he heard her, explaining something to the picture editor, and climbed on his desk to see the owner of that cool, confident voice.

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The office was divided by grey, seven-foot-high partitions that made up the individual offices. It looked like a corporate maze. But if you knelt on your desk you could see over the top of the partitions. Two offices down he saw her - shockingly gorgeous, although he could not work out why. It was something to do with the way she carried herself. But he felt it for the first time - the little swoon of longing.

'I've gone for a look of emptiness and stillness,' she was telling the picture editor. 'I think you'll find it's redolent of the Gerard Malanga shots of Warhol and the Velvet Underground.' She had been taking pictures of Boney M.

Together Misty and the picture editor were poring over her contact sheets, these glossy black sheets of paper with tiny photographs - Terry had never seen a contact sheet before - drawing lines in red felt-tip around the shots they liked, then finally choosing one image by placing a cross next to it. Like a kiss, Terry thought, knowing already that it was hopeless. She was way out of his league.

T know they're ridiculous,' Misty was saying. 'But it's like Warhol himself said, Everybody's plastic, but I love plastic'

She looked up then and caught Terry's eye and he attempted a smile that came out as an idiot leer. She frowned impatiently, and it just made her look prettier, and made him ache with hopeless yearning. And just then the two older guys came for him.

They loped into his office with no door, all faded denim and lank hair, untouched by the changes happening on what Terry and everyone else on The Paper thought of as the street. 'Smoke, man?' one of them said.

Terry was immediately on his feet, practically snapping to attention, and holding out a packet of Silk Cut. And the older guys looked at each other and smiled. Five minutes later Terry felt like he was dying. With the giant spliff still in his hand, Terry shivered and shuddered, the sweat pouring down his face, his back, making is capped T-shirt stick to his skin. He wanted to lie down. He anted to be sick. He wanted it all to be over.

The older guys had stopped cackling with laughter and were starting to look concerned. Their faces swam in front of Terry's rolling eyes. One of them prised the joint from Terry's fist. Are you okay, man?' 'He's really wasted, man.'

They were in the shadow of the monstrous grey tower block that was home to The Paper - an entire skyscraper full of magazines about every subject under the sun, from stamp collecting and hunting foxes and cars and football and knitting all the way to music, three titles on every floor - loitering in a scrap of wasteland that doubled as a makeshift car park, overlooking a silvery patch of the Thames and the mournful tug boats.

'Don't feel well,' Terry croaked. 'Might sit down. Until I feel better.'

The older guys went, leaving him to his fate. It was… now what was the word? What was the word that people on The Paper had used all morning when something was even slightly out of the ordinary, like the lady who came round with the sandwiches running out of cheese-and-tomato rolls? Oh yes - Terry remembered the word. It was surreal.

His thoughts felt like they were being formed in quicksand. He could taste his stomach in his mouth. He pressed his clammy face against the tower block, moaning, and felt the entire skyscraper slide away from him. Surreal didn't quite cover it. Terry had been poisoned. And then Ray Keeley was standing before him.?„

Even through the thick fog of industrial-strength ganja, Terry knew it was him. Ray was wearing a Stetson, like Dennis Hopper in Easy Rider, and it made him look like a hallucination, a vision of the Old West glimpsed on the banks of the Thames.

Ray Keeley was only seventeen, but Terry had been reading his stuff for years. Every week Terry looked at Ray's by-line picture

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in The Paper- he looked like those early shots of Jackson Browne, the open-faced matinee idol eyes peering out from behind the veil of long, lank, wheat-coloured hair - a teenage hippy heart-throb -and the envy came at Terry in waves, like a toothache.

Ray was the rising star on The Paper in the mid-Seventies, a pretty and precocious fifth-former rhapsodising about Joni Mitchell, Jackson Browne and the whole California thing that seemed so very far away now. And Ray liked the Beatles, especially the Beatles, even though they were further away than anything, even though they had broken up a full four years ago, and John was hiding in the Dakota and Paul was touring with his wife and Ringo was banging out the novelty records and George was disappearing up his own Hari Krishna.

You read Ray Keeley and you forgot about the three-day week and the miners' strike and the streets full of rat-infested rubbish that no one was ever going to collect. All the grey dreariness slipped away when you read Ray Keeley on seeing Dylan at Wembley, reviewing Joni Mitchell's Court and Spark, even trying to give Wings the benefit of the doubt. You read Ray and suddenly it was yesterday once more, summer in the Sixties, the party that everyone under the age of twenty-five had missed. You forgot about Ted Heath and thought about making love to Joni in the dunes on the beach at Monterey. But Ray wasn't writing so much lately.

'You all right?' he asked Terry, with the expression of one who already knew the answer.

Terry shook his head, speechless, feeling as if his body was paralysed and his mind was broken and his tongue was the size of an oven glove.

Then Ray did something unexpected. He put his arm around him.

'You've got to take it easy with that stuff,' he said. 'These guys are used to it. You're not. Come on, let's get you back to the office. Before someone shops us.'

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'How'd you know?' Terry mumbled. 'How'd you know me from The Paper1.' Ray grinned. 'Not from Horse and Hound, are you?' Terry laughed. 'Nah!'

Ray half-dragged and half-carried Terry back to the office, and sat him at his desk, and gave him orange juice and black coffee until the shivering and the sweating and the sickness began to subside. Ray took care of Terry when he had been left to melt in the dirt by a couple of the older guys, and it was a simple act of decency that Terry would never forget. He tried to thank him but his tongue was a dead weight. 'Be cool, man,' Ray told him. 'Just take it easy now.'

All that first morning people had been telling Terry to be cool and take it easy. The music had changed, and most of the haircuts, and people were throwing away their flares and buying straight-legged trousers, but the language was still largely the lexicon of the Sixties.

For all the changes, for all the new things, a different language had yet to be invented. All that old-fashioned jive about being mellow and taking it easy and loving one another was still around. Be cool. Take it easy.

All that first morning these worn-out old words had sounded empty to Terry Warboys. But he found himself giving his new friend a stoned, wonky smile.

Because Terry thought that when Ray Keeley said these things, they actually sounded as though they meant something. Ray let himself into the house, and was immediately assaulted by the smell of home-brewed beer and the sound of the television.

'Miss Belgian Congo is a nineteen-year-old beautician who says her ambition is to travel, end all wars and meet Sacha DisteV

'Back again, are you?' the old man shouted, not stirring from his chair in front of the TV. 'Like a bloody hotel…' It was true. Ray treated his parents' suburban semi like a hotel,

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coming and going without warning, never staying long. But the funny thing was he treated hotels like they were home. The last two nights, when he had been in the Holiday Inn in Birmingham and Travel Lodge in Leicester, he could not stop himself from making his hotel bed in the morning. It was as if his home was out there somewhere.

Ray ran upstairs to his room, hardly registering the presence of his younger brother sprawled on his bed, reading a football magazine.

After chucking his bag in a corner Ray knelt before the stereo on his side of the room. The pose made him seem like a religious supplicant, but when he ran his fingers along the spine of his record collection, it was like a lover - familiar, loving, taking his time, and knowing exactly what was there before he had even looked.

The records were alphabetically filed. The As were sparse and unplayed for years - Alice Cooper and Argent and Abba and Atomic Rooster - but? was for The White Album, Abbey Road, Revolver, Rubber Soul, Let It Be, A Hard Day's Night…? was for Beatles galore.

He pulled out Abbey Road, and the boys marching in single file across that zebra crossing brought back twenty melodies. Ray knew that street in St John's Wood better than he knew the road where he lived.

The white VW parked on the pavement, the curious passerby in the distance, and the unbroken blue of a cloudless summer sky. And the four of them, all with a role to play. George in denim - the gravedigger. Paul barefoot - the corpse. Ringo in his long black drape - the undertaker. And John in white - the angel.

Ray replaced Abbey Road. Almost idly, his index finger fell upon the Ds - Blood on the Tracks by Dylan, Morrison Hotel and L.A. Woman by the Doors, The Golden Hour of Donovan, The Best of Bo Diddley and… For Your Pleasure. For Your Pleasure? Ray's handsome face frowned at the cracked cardboard spine. What were Roxy Music doing among the Ds? Ray glared across at Robbie.

His twelve-year-old brother was reclining on his bed with a copy of Shoot! It was double games on Tuesday afternoons and there was a smudge of mud running right across the bridge of Robbie's nose, like war paint on the face of a Red Indian. 'You been touching my records again?' Ray said.

'No way, Jose,' Robbie said, not looking up from a feature on Charlie George.

Ray furiously filed Roxy Music next to the Rolling Stones, where they belonged. Then he turned back to his kid brother.

'Don't touch my records, okay? And if you do touch my records -don't, but if you do - put them back in the right place, okay? You don't put Roxy Music in with Dylan and the Doors.' Robbie mimed a yawn. 'I've got my own records,' he said.

Ray laughed. 'Yeah, Disney Favourites and Alvin Stardust's Greatest Hits'

Robbie looked up, stung. It was the brutal truth. Robbie only owned two records.

'I'm getting In the City for Christmas.' His brother had recently seen the Jam on Top of the Pops. It had been love at first sight. 'Mum's getting it for me.'

Ray ignored his brother. Bickering with a kid was beneath him. He pulled out Pretzel Logic by Steely Dan, the cover - that old man selling pretzels, that frozen American street - as familiar as the bedroom he shared with his baby brother. It was as if his record collection was the real world, and the place where he lived was the dream.

He loved the way that albums demanded your attention. The way you held them in both hands and they filled your vision and all you could see was their beauty. For a moment he thought of the girl last night, the Bouquet of Barbed Wire press officer. There was a girl on the cover of Pretzel Logic, in the background,

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walking away, hair long and trousers flared, a girl that probably looked just like Ali McGraw in Love Story. He wondered about her life, and who she loved, and how he could ever meet her. Ray Keeley ached for a girl of his own. Holding that album was like holding that girl. Or as close as he would ever get.

'Ray! Robbie! Your tea's ready,' his mother called up from the foot of the stairs. Ray sighed with appreciation as he closed the sleeve.

His father was sitting in his favourite armchair like some suburban sultan while his mum carried plates of bread and jam into the front room. Ray's parents were an unlikely match - his mother a small nervous woman, jumping at shadows, his father as broad as he was tall, a bull of a man in carpet slippers, and these days always on the edge of anger.

Above the new fireplace - the real fire had just been ripped out and replaced with a gas job that had fake coals and unlikely-looking flames - there were photographs in silver frames.

Ray's parents on their wedding day. Ray and his two brothers John and Robbie on a sightseeing junk in Hong Kong harbour, three little kids - Robbie small, Ray medium and John large -smiling and squinting in the blazing sub-tropical sunshine. Their father grinning proudly in the light khaki of the Hong Kong Police Force, looking like an overgrown boy scout in his shorts and woolly socks, his bony knees colonial white.

Somewhere in the middle Sixties the photographs turned from black and white to colour. And among the colour photos there was John, eighteen years old now, in the darker uniform of the British Army, taken just before he was killed when an IRA bomb went off on a country road in South Armagh. It was the most recent photograph. Nothing had been right since then.

On the television, young women in swimming suits and high heels were staring ahead with fixed smiles as Matt Monro moved among them singing 'Thank Heaven for Little Girls'. Ray and his mum sat on the sofa and Robbie sprawled between hem on the floor. Everybody drank diluted orange cordial apart from his father, who had a cloudy glass of home-made beer by his feet.

'Now how can you compare some tart from Bongo Bongo Land with some tart from England?' he asked. 'It's not fair on them, is it? The darkies. Completely different standards of beauty.'

Ray rolled his eyes. The same old stuff, on and on, never ending. They said that travel broadened the mind. They had obviously never met his father.

'I might marry a black woman,' Ray said through a mouthful of Mother's Pride and Robertson's strawberry jam, the- one with the smiling Golliwog cavorting on the jar. 'Your grandchildren might be half black. Did that ever occur to you, Dad?'

A cloud seemed to pass across his father's face. 'What about the kids? The little half-castes? Did you ever think about them? Not belonging to any group. How do you think that feels?'

'If we all got mixed up together then there wouldn't be any more racism,' Ray said. 'Because then we would all be the same. Got any more blackcurrant, Mum?'

It was one of the things he argued about with his father. Along with the volume and value of his music, the length of his hair and John Lennon. It felt like they argued about everything these days. Ray wished he knew a black woman just so he could marry her and show his father that all men were brothers.

'Birds of a feather,' Ray's father said, pointing his knife at Ray. 'You don't see robins flying about with crows, do you?' 'Are you a crow, Dad? Are you a robin?'

'She's nice,' his mum said. 'Miss Korea. What one do you like, Robbie?'

'I don't like any of them!' Robbie said, blushing furiously. Ray laughed. He knew that his brother liked all of them. He wasn't fussy. He had heard Robbie fiddling about in his stripy pyjamas when he thought that Ray was sleeping. 'Enoch's right,' his father said. 'Send them all back.'

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'What if they come from here?' Ray said, pushing the last of his bread and jam into his mouth. 'Where you going to send them back to, Dad?'

With his father still ranting about birds of a feather and beasts in the wild, Ray got up and carried his plate out to the kitchen and went upstairs to his bedroom. He knew what he needed, and put on the Who as loud as he dared - '5.15', sad and angry all at once, to match the way he felt. Why should I care? Why should I care?

As he made sure that he had enough tube fare to get him back to the city, Ray remembered something he had heard at The Paper. Skip Jones had told him that taking heroin was like stepping into a golden bubble - your troubles melted away when you were in there. That was how Ray felt about his music. It made the world go away.

But from downstairs came the rank stench of home-made beer -bitter hops, liquid malt extract and priming syrup, the whole sorry mess fermenting in the huge metal vats for weeks at a time - and it almost made him gag. That was the problem with living at home with his parents. Ray's floor would always be his father's ceiling. Leon stood at the hermetically sealed windows of The Paper, watching the sun going down and the crowds leaving the tower block, scuttling to Waterloo station and home.

When he was certain that most of them had gone, he went to the washroom and stared into the mirror above the sink. He waited for a few moments, heard a cleaner clatter by, and then slowly removed his hat.

Leon's hair was thick and wiry, like something you would use for scrubbing pans, but what was most striking about it was that i few hours earlier it had been dyed a virulent orange. Autumn (iold, it had said on the packet.

Leon winced as if he had been slapped. He quickly replaced his hat, gripped the brim with both hands and firmly pulled it down over his ears. It was a disaster. As always. Leon hated his hair. And Leon's hair hated him right back.

There was a line from a Rod Stewart song, back when Leon was fifteen years old and Rod was still big mates with John Peel and playing the working-class hero - kicking footballs around on Top of the Pops, pretending he was fresh off the terraces, before he developed that embarrassing taste for straw boaters and blazers and high-maintenance blondes and Art Deco lamps, and everyone had to pretend that they had never liked him in the first place.

It was the first line of the first track on Every Picture Tells A Story - the line that rhymed 'mirror' and 'inferior'. Leon always felt like that song had been written about him.

He knew there were battles to fight now. The middle ground was collapsing, and the Fascists were getting stronger. Not the public-bar bigots, the Alf Garnetts ranting on the sofa, but real Jew-baiting, Paki-bashing Fascists. Out there right now, getting bolder by the day, their numbers swelling, the hate spreading like a virus. Leon had seen their faces at Lewisham, clocked their proud Nazi salutes, and glimpsed what was inside them. There was nothing remotely funny about them, these dreamers of repatriation, these would-be builders of new ovens. Something had to be done.

So why the fuck, Leon asked himself, was he still worried about his hair? You didn't need a good haircut at the barricades.

He slung his record bag over his shoulder. Inside it was the latest edition of his fanzine, Red Mist. Too valuable to leave lying around the office, Leon believed. Someone might steal it.

The fanzine - a Xeroxed mix of radical politics, new music and cut-up kidnapper's graphics, hastily stapled together - had landed Leon his job on The Paper eighteen months ago, reminding some

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of the older guys of their radical youth. But there were sighs and rolling eyes when Leon tried to sell Red Mist in the office, and when he said they should have more politics and less showbiz.

'We're a music paper, man,' they told him every day, as if the music could ever be separated from what was going on in the street, as if music wasn't a part of the real world but just some playpen that they climbed into for light entertainment.

Leon believed that the new music could be a force for social change. The fire still burned. The audience just needed to be radicalised. And the musicians just needed to be educated. Basically all you needed to change was everything.

Most of the new groups just didn't get it. They dreamed of the same old stuff - sexual opportunities, uncut white drugs and driving a Rolls-Royce into a swimming pool. They thought that anti-Nazism was just a cool brand name to be dropped in interviews, just another pose to be struck, as empty as Mick lagger marching to Grosvenor Square to stop the Vietnam War in the Sixties.

But Leon knew this was real. The Labour Government wasn't going to last for ever. Jim Callaghan wasn't going to be around for much longer. And then what would happen? Fighting in the streets, Leon reckoned. Struggle. Civil unrest. More riots. Read your history books, he thought. Ask A. J. P. Taylor. See what happens when the centre is too weak to hold. A Lewisham every day of the year.

And when it was all over, from the ashes would rise a better world where racism was defeated and Leon's hair did exactly what it was told to do.

THREE

I tell you, Dag Wood is hung like Red Rum,' Terry said. 'When he ets it out, it's like - I don't know - an Indian snake charmer… r a sailor with a rope… he sort of has to unfurl it.'

This was one of the best parts of the job, Terry thought, oming home and telling your mates what had happened, all the interesting stuff that you weren't allowed to put in a magazine..^at they sold in sweet shops. He loved it. He looked over at Misty sitting on his desk and she smiled encouragement. He knew how to tell a story.

'Now are you sure it was Red Rum?' Leon said, slightly bashful in the presence of Misty. He had only recently learned how to be around her without blushing. He was sitting on his desk, knees drawn up to his chin, smiling as Terry paced their little office, holding his hands out like a fisherman measuring the one that got away. 'Are you sure it wasn't Arkle he was hung like?'

'What's Red Rum?' Ray said, swinging back and forth in his chair, fiddling with his tape recorder, his hair falling in his face.

'Famous racehorse,' Leon said. 'Won the Grand National lots of times. Despite being built like Dag Wood.'

'Definitely Red Rum,' Terry said. 'I got a good look. We were standing at these traffic lights, right? Just me and Dag, in the middle

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of the night. And he's asking me about the scene in London -how good the bands really are, what the audience are going to make of him - and this VW Beetle pulls up at a red light, and Dag whips it out - unfurls himself - and then… takes a leak on the Beetle with this enormous thing.' Terry shook his head. He still couldn't believe it. The outrageous act had been done so casually, so naturally, that he still couldn't work out if Dag had done it to shock him, or if he was truly that untamed. 'I'll never forget the look on that Beetle driver's face.'

Misty slid off Terry's desk and half-raised a hand in salute, leaving their office with a wry smile and a raised eyebrow, like a wife of twenty-five years who enjoyed the story, but who had heard it before: Dag taking cocaine until his ears bled, Dag reducing a woman reporter from Fleet Street to tears, Dag banging groupies two at a time after his girlfriend had left town.

There were things about Dag that had made Terry uncomfortable - the cruelty, the casual, almost gluttonous infidelity, the choice of drugs - everybody in London under the age of twenty-five believed that cocaine was the chemical equivalent of a feather cut. But Dag had been like every rock star that Terry had ever met - a great seducer.

Dag had gone out of his way to make Terry love him - giving him a book of Van Gogh's letters to his brother Theo that Dag had been given by David Bowie - there was a neatly written inscription at the front - borrowing some instruments in a West Berlin jazz bar so that Dag and his band could play a few of their greatest hits, showing him his extraordinary cock - and so Terry did.

In fact, Terry loved Dag so very much that there was one thing he had left out of both his piece and the other story he told his friends. Dag looked old.

Really old. Horribly old. If you could imagine Rip Van Winkle as a porn star, then you were getting the general idea about Dag Wood and the way he looked. Terry had been so eager to hero worship Dag, so desperate to lionise this man that all the new bands name-checked as a major influence, so hungry to be his best friend that he hadn't had the heart to say how prehistoric Dag looked.

Dag's body - which he showed off at every possible opportunity, habitually tearing off his shirt not just on stage but during interviews and at sound checks and at the hotel's buffet breakfast - was still in great shape, lean and pumped, like one of those Charles Atlas ads at the back of DC and Marvel comics.

But the ravages of ten thousand nights of debauchery and depravity were in every deeply ploughed line of Dag's- face, like Dorian Gray in silver lame trousers with his hair dyed white. Dag Wood looked like a recently deceased bodybuilder. But Terry kept that to himself. Because it didn't fit his story.

The three of them looked up as the editor of The Paper appeared in their doorway. Kevin White was twenty-nine years old, and every inch a grown-up version of the Mod he had once been. The only man in the office who came to work in a suit. White was tall, powerfully built, with curtain-parting hair, like one of the Small Faces around the time of 'Lazy Sunday'. 'Can I see you in my office, Ray?'

Ray shoved his tape recorder in his desk and followed White to his office. Leon pulled a copy of Red Mist out of his shoulder bag and began thumbing through it. Terry sat at his desk, closed his eyes and sighed with contentment.

It was good, yes, telling his friends was good. Almost the best part.

But when Terry introduced Dag Wood to Misty later at the Western World, and they both saw just how much the other one loved him, then it would be perfect. 'So how's it going?'

Kevin White slumped into his chair and put his feet on his desk. The editor had the only corner office in The Paper, and Ray

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could see what seemed like all of London stretching out behind him. 'It's going okay,' Ray said, making his fringe fall forward over his face. Even after three years, he couldn't quite get over this shyness he felt around the editor. Ray had known White since he was fifteen years old, turning up in the reception of The Paper with a handwritten think piece on the Eagles when he should have been writing about An Inspector Calls for an English Literature paper. White had never treated him with anything but kindness. But somehow that only made Ray's shyness worse. It was funny. Ray had never yet met a rock star that he felt in awe of, but he was in awe of Kevin White. 'Your mum okay?' She's on the Valium, Ray thought. She cries in her sleep. Sometimes she can't get out of bed in the morning. If you mention John she looks like she's been given an electric shock. 'She's all right,' Ray said.

White glanced at the photograph on his desk of two smiling toddlers, a small boy and a smaller girl. He was the only person in the office who had a photo of children on his desk. 'I can't imagine what she's been through,' White said, more to himself than Ray. 'No parent should ever have to bury their child.' Ray didn't know what to say. Unless they were talking about music, he always felt tongue-tied around the editor. Like every other writer on The Paper, Ray thought that White was touched with greatness. Everybody knew the story. Even the readers.

In the early Seventies The Paper was a pop rag in terminal decline, called The Music Paper, if anything could ever be that corny - but then all music papers had corny tides, from Melody Maker to New Musical Express to Sounds to Disc, they all had names that had sounded groovy back when dinosaurs walked the earth - and Kevin White had saved it.

White had left school at fifteen, working on the print at the Daily Express with his father, his uncles, his brothers and his cousins until some bright spark above stairs asked the teenage Mod to write 500 words on a Motown revue - a dream ticket with the Four Tops, the Supremes, Stevie Wonder, Martha Reeves and the Vandellas and Smokey Robinson and the Miracles all on one bill. White never looked back, and he was a junior reporter on The Music Paper when the big chance came. The suits upstairs gave White three months to increase advertising revenue and double the circulation, or they were going to put The Music Paper out of its misery.

White dropped the Music from the masthead, fired all the old farts who were nostalgic for the days when the big news was the Tremeloes' tour and Herman's Hermits' secret heartache and whether Peter Tork was going to leave the Monkees. In a daring last throw of the dice, White kept the title alive by hiring heads, freaks and harries from what was left of the underground press, because the underground press was dead or dying too. It felt like everything was dying in the early Seventies.

Ray could imagine the looks on their faces at Horse and Hound when the new writers started turning up for work, all those refugees from Oz and Red Dwarf and Friendz and IT who filled The Paper with tales of bands that all the other heads, freaks and hairies knew by affectionate abbreviations. Heep. Floyd. Quo. Lizzy. Tull. Zep. And those writers loved Kevin White, just as Ray loved him, because White had the guts and the vision to do something that nobody else in this entire tower block of magazines would ever do - he gave you your first chance. 'You just got back, didn't you?' White said.

Ray nodded, on surer ground now the talk was moving on to bands. 'Thin Lizzy,' he said. 'Leicester and Birmingham. Two thousand words. Centre spread.' 'Good tour?' White said.

Ray nodded, smiling. Thin Lizzy had been the first band he ever went on the road with, and they would always have a special place in his heart. When Ray had been a bumbling schoolboy with

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absolutely no idea how to conjure a two-page feature out of forty-eight hours with a band, Phil Lynott, the band's black Irish frontman, had taken care of him - showed Ray that on the road it was okay to drink screwdrivers at breakfast if they calmed you down, coached Ray on how to conduct an interview, and even turned on Ray's tape recorder when it was time to talk. 'You've written about them before, haven't you?' White said. 'This will be the third feature,' Ray said.

White sighed, and something about that sound sent a sense of dread crawling up Ray's spine. For the first time since entering the editor's office, he felt that this was going to be bad.

'Yeah, you've been doing this for a while, haven't you?' White took his feet off the desk and looked out the window. 'And that's the big problem with this job. You can only do it for so long.'

Ray felt sick to his stomach. That was the flip side of White's fresh-blood policy - it meant some guy at the far side of his twenties quietly being put out to pasture.

But surely not me, Ray thought. I'm young. And I've got nowhere else to go. Nowhere else I want to be.

'It's like this, Ray,' the editor said, talking more quickly now, wanting to get it over with. 'We can't send you to interview the new groups.' 'But - Thin Lizzy!'

White held up a hand. 'Hardly new. And that's different. We all love the first band we went on the road with. You can't do that every week.' Then White was leaning forward, almost pleading. 'I need writers who I can send to interview Johnny Rotten and Elvis Costello and Dag Wood.' White sighed with exasperation. And that's not you, is it? Look at your hair.'

Ray suddenly saw himself in White's eyes and - beyond die paternal affection and friendly chitchat - Ray saw that he looked ridiculous.

The music had changed, as the music always will, and Ray had not changed with it. Suddenly The Paper didn't need a young head who was still hung up on the flowers-in-your-hair thing. It was a joke, man. Ray still believed in the whole peace and love and acoustic guitars thing that everybody was sneering about now. How could you send someone like that to talk to John Lydon? What would the Clash think?

He was no longer the little star. The world had changed while he wasn't looking. It was like Ray - Beatles fan, California dreamer, the hippy child who was born ten years too late - was a star of the silent era, and talkies had just come in. He watched the editor pick up a copy of The Paper and turn to the section for album reviews.

'Listen to this,' White said. 'Another slice of New Nihilism for all you crazy pop kids, and it's like staring into an abyss of meaning-lessness.'

Ray listened to his words being read. His mood improved. He had been reasonably pleased with it, especially the bit about the abyss of meaninglessness. That sounded pretty good. That sounded like something Skip Jones might write. 'What's wrong with it?' Ray said mildly.

Kevin White scowled at him, and Ray flinched. The editor could be scary when he wanted to be. For five years he had bossed an office full of precocious, overgrown adolescents, all of them high-IQ misfits, many of them habitual users of illegal substances. He knew how to control a meeting.

'The abyss of meaninglessness?' White threw the paper on his desk. 'It's?? and the Sunshine Band!' Then his voice softened. White had seen it all before. Writers who were once part of the Zeitgeist - a word that was freely bandied around in the offices of The Paper - but now belonged to yesterday, writers who had done their stint on The Paper, their bit for rock and roll, and didn't realise that it was time to be moving on. Writers who had lived for music suddenly discovering that everything they heard disgusted them, suddenly discovering that the music didn't live for them.

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'This new music…' Ray shook his head, and a veil of yellow hair fell in front of his face. He brushed it away. 'Tear it down, smash it up. No words you can understand, no tunes you can hear.'

'Who are you?' White said angrily. 'My maiden aunt from Brighton?'

Ray hated it when the editor raised his voice. It reminded him of home.

'What's happening?' Ray said. 'I don't understand what's happening.'

But he understood only too well. He should have been writing ten years ago, when it really felt like this music was going to change the world. 1967 - summer of love, year of wonders, the year of Sgt Pepper, when music was still pushing back the boundaries, when people still believed in something. He should have been in London when heads and hearts were still open, when there was still the possibility of glimpsing the Beatles playing live on a rooftop in Savile Row. He should have been tooling around and taking notes when the world still believed in love, enlightenment and John Lennon. And he should definitely have been at Woodstock, chanting no rain, no rain in the mud, with flowers in his hair and a California girl in his sleeping bag, a mellow smoke on the go, good acid in his veins turning everything the colour of sunshine, and maybe Arlo Guthrie up on stage singing. Instead of having to wait until the film came out in the grey light of a colder, drabber new decade. Yes, those few days on Yasgur's farm really summed it all up for Ray. Were you at Woodstock? No, but I saw the film with my mum. Kevin White took a deep breath.

'Maybe, Ray, maybe a move from the staff to freelance would be good for you, and good for the paper.' Ray's eyes were hot. 'Would I still have my desk?' he asked.

White shifted uncomfortably. 'Well, probably we would have to give your desk to someone else.' Ray could see it now. He would be like one of the freelancers who came into the office hoping to be tossed a bone - a minor album to review, a lesser gig to attend - while the stars of The Paper wrote the cover stories, while Terry and Leon flew around the world, and got their picture next to their by-line. No desk to call his own, never really belonging, on the way out.

'This is the only job I want,' Ray said, and it was true. Ray could not imagine his life without The Paper, without his friends, without the comforting routines and rituals of rock and roll - going on the road, doing the singles, having somewhere to come every day, somewhere that felt more like home than the house where he lived. He had loved it as a reader, and he loved it as a -writer. On either side of the looking glass, it was in his blood.

'Then you're going to have to give me something fast,' White said, embarrassed that he had to act like the boss of IBM or something. 'Something I can use.'

At that moment Leon Peck burst into the editor's office. 'Let me read you something,' he said. 'Sorry and all that - this won't take long.'

White and Ray stared at Leon. 'Don't you knock?' White said. 'And what's with the stupid hat?'

'The Nazis are coming back,' Leon said, tugging self-consciously at his trilby. 'So maybe we should worry a little less about bourgeois convention and a little more about stopping them.' He cleared his throat and read from the copy of the Sunday Telegraph he was holding. 'It is a disquieting fact, recognised by all the major political parties, that more and more people are giving their support to groups which believe in taking politics to the street' 'What's the point?' White said.

Under the brim of his hat, Leon's eyes were shining with emotion. 'Boss, I was down there on Saturday. Look, look,' he said, pointing at the bruise under his eye. 'Look what they did to me.'

'You'll live,' White said. Ray noticed he was a lot rougher with Leon than he was with him. But then Leon hadn't been just a kid when he first walked into The Paper.

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'Let me write something,' Leon begged. 'Give me next week's cover. Hitler said that if they'd crushed him when he was small, he would never have succeeded.'

'This shower are just a bunch of skinheads, that's all,' White said, taking the Sunday Telegraph from Leon and looking at the picture of the flag-waving mob. 'They couldn't find their own arse without a road map, I can't see them invading Poland.' He handed back the newspaper. 'And Elvis Costello is on next week's cover.' White thought about it. 'But all right - you can give me 500 words on Lewisham. Anybody go to this demo?'

Leon smiled. 'I'm assuming you don't mean thousands of anti-Fascist protesters, boss. I guess you mean rock stars. Concerned rock stars.' White rolled his eyes. 'Anyone our readers might've heard of.'

'No, they were all too busy doing photo shoots and getting their teeth capped to fight Fascism. But I hear John Lennon is in town.'

Ray's jaw fell open. He stared at Leon, not believing a word of it. 'Lennon's in New York,' he said. 'In the Dakota with Yoko and baby Sean.'

Leon shook his head. 'Lennon's in London,' he said. 'For one night only. Someone at EMI just called me. Thought it might make an item in the diary. Passing through on his way to Japan.' Leon cackled. 'Give me McCartney any day of the week. At least Paul knows he's a boring old fart who sold out years ago. Think Beatle John would fancy pinning on his Chairman Mao badge and coming to the next riot? Has he still got his beret? Or should we start the revolution without him?'

'Well, he started it without you,' Kevin White said. 'Come on -what are you doing for us, Leon?'

Leon's face fell. Ray knew that's what they always said when they wanted you to get in line. What are you doing for us? 'Well, mostly I'll be working on this riot story,' Leon said. T thought we could call it Dedicated Followers of Fascism. Maybe -' White consulted a scrap of paper on his desk. 'Leni and the Riefenstahls are at the Red Cow tonight. You can give me a review of that by first thing tomorrow morning - 800 words.'

Leon nodded. 'So that's 500 words for the fight against Fascism, and 800 words for Leni and the Riefenstahls - who less than a year ago were parading around the 100 Club in swastika armbands. Right.' 'We're still a music paper, Leon.'

Leon laughed. 'That's right. We're doing the pogo while Rome burns.'

'A good journalist can write well about anything. Look at that piece by your father this morning. You see that?' White asked, turning to Ray. 'A piece about the cod war - what could be more boring than the cod war?'

T didn't see it,' Ray said, still thinking about John Lennon. But he knew that Leon's father wrote a column for a liberal broadsheet. He was one of the few journalists in Fleet Street that was read and respected up at The Paper.

'It was about the decline of Britain as an imperial power,' White told Ray. 'About how we used to go to war to fight for freedom. And now we go to war to fight about fish. Brilliant.' White shook his head. 'Brilliant. Tell him how much I liked it, would you?' 'Bit tricky that,' Leon said, edging towards the door. 'Why's that?' White said. T don't talk to my father.'

They were all silent for a bit. Leon caught Ray's eye and looked away. 'Oh,' White said. 'Okay.'

Leon closed the door behind him. Ray realised that the editor of The Paper was watching his face. 'So,' White said. 'Think you can get me John Lennon?'

Ray gawped, feeling the sweat break out on his face. 'Get you John Lennon? Who do I call? How do I get you John Lennon?'

White laughed. 'You don't call anyone. There's no one to call. No press officers, no publicists. EMI can't help you - this is a

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private trip. You just go out there and find him. Then you talk to him. Like a real grown-up reporter. Like a real journalist. Like Leon's father. Like that. Think you can do it?'

There was so much that Ray wanted to say to John Lennon that he was sure he would not be able to say a word. Even if he could find him among the ten million souls in that Waterloo sunset. 'I don't know,' Ray said honestly.

'If you find him,' White said, his blood starting to pump, his editor's instincts kicking in, 'we'll put him on the cover. World exclusive - John talks!' 'But - but what about pictures?'

White looked exasperated. 'Not Lennon the way he is now -he must be knocking on for forty! No, an old shot from the archives. Lennon the way he was in Hamburg - short hair and a leather jacket, skinny and pale. You know what that would look like, don't you?' Ray thought about it. 'That would look like… now.'

'Exactly! Very 1977. Totally 1977. Nothing could be more now than the way the Beatles looked in Hamburg. They were out of their boxes on speed, did you know that? I can see the cover copy: Another kid in a leather jacket on his way to God knows where…' 'But Leon says he's leaving tomorrow!'

White's fist slammed down on his desk. 'Come on, Ray. Are you a writer - or a fan?'

Ray needed to think about that. He had no idea if he was a real journalist, or if he would ever be. How could you tell? Who had ever dreamed that loving music would turn into a full-time job? He was a kid who had written about music because it was more interesting than a paper round, and because they didn't give you free records if you stacked shelves in a supermarket. 'I don't know what I am,' he said.

But Kevin White was no longer listening. The editor was staring over at the door, and Ray followed his gaze. On the other side of the rectangular pane of glass, there were men in suits waiting to see Kevin White. Men from upstairs, management, bald old geezers with ties and wrinkles who looked like your dad, or somebody's dad. They were waiting for White to finish with Ray. Sometimes White had to smooth things out with them. One time a cleaner found a wastepaper bin full of roaches, and suddenly there were men in suits everywhere, all having a fit. But White worked it out. He was a great editor. Ray didn't want to let him down.

'I'll try my best,' Ray said. 'But I don't know if I'm a real journalist or just somebody who likes music'

Kevin White stood up. It was time for him to face the men in suits again. • 'You'd better find out,' the editor said. Leon was gone. Terry was sitting on his desk, his DMs dangling, flicking through the copy of last week's Paper that Misty had given him at the airport.

'This is what you need, Ray,' he said. 'New! The Gringo Waistcoat. Get into the Original Gringo Waistcoat - the new style. You'd look lovely in a Gringo Waistcoat.'

Ray dropped into his chair and stared into space. Terry didn't notice. It was an endless source of amusement to him that the classifieds in The Paper were always exactly one year behind the times. While the kid in the street was trying to look like Johnny Rotten, the models in the ads still looked like Jason King.

Cotton-drill loons - still only Ј2.80… Moccasin boots - choose from one long top fringe or three freaky layers.

According to the classifieds, the readers of The Paper were wearing exactly what they had been wearing for the last ten years -flared jeans, Afghan coats, cheesecloth galore, and, always and for ever, T-shirts with amusing slogans. Sometimes it felt like The Paper would not exist without T-shirts with amusing slogans.

I CHOKED LINDA LOVELACE. LIE DOWN I THINK I LOVE YOU. SEX APPEAL - GIVE GENEROUSLY. And that timeless classic, the fucking flying ducks - two cartoon ducks, coupling in

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mid-flight, the male duck looking hugely satisfied, the female duck looking alarmed.

Terry leaned back, smiling to himself, his spiky head resting against a picture he had torn from a library book and sellotaped to his wall - Olga Korbut, smiling sweetly, bent double on the mat. After the Montreal Olympics last year, a lot of people had switched their affections to the Romanian girl, Nadia Comaneci, but Terry was sticking with Olga.

They each had their own wall, facing their desk with its typewriter, a sleek Olivetti Valentine in red moulded plastic. On Terry's wall were bands and girls - record company 8x10 glossies of the New York Dolls, the Clash and the Sex Pistols plus images pillaged from magazines of Debbie Harry in a black mini-dress, Jane Fonda in Barbarella and Olga Korbut at the Munich Olympics.

Leon's wall was by far the most artistic - an undercoat of favourite bands had been almost obliterated by headlines cut from newspapers, with yet another layer of breaking news and advertising slogans pasted on top. So a record company glossy of the Buzzcocks had a headline about the death of Mao Tse-Tung running diagonally across it, while a yellowing picture from The Times of General Franco's coffin was enhanced with an ad for the new Only Ones single. And as Ray swung round in his chair and took out his tape recorder, he was watched by pictures of John Lennon.

There were also dog-eared images of Joni Mitchell and Dylan and Neil Young, but Ray's wall was really a shrine to Lennon. John gone solo, in white suit and round NHS specs, Yoko hanging on to his arm. John when he had just started growing his hair, that golden middle period of Revolver and Rubber Soul. John during Beatlemania, grinning in a suit with the rest of the boys. And the leather-jacket John of Hamburg, all James Dean cock and swagger, too vain to wear his glasses… This fucking, fucking tape recorder! The problem was that one of the spools was slightly off kilter. Ray had probably bent it pulling out the cassette after interviewing Phil Lynott with one too many screwdrivers and half a spliff in his system. Now the spool described an erratic circle when it should be standing up straight. You couldn't stick this thing in front of John Lennon.

Terry guffawed. 'Listen to this,' he said. 'Couple of girls trying to get up a petition to get Roxy Music back on the road - they say, Roxy Must Rule Again.'

Ray looked over his shoulder, smiling at his friend. The classifieds were a magic kingdom of musicians wanted, records wanted, girlfriends wanted, perfect worlds wanted, where ads for Greenpeace and Save the Whales were right next to ads for cotton-drill loon pants and Gringo Waistcoats.

But Ray saw that though there was derision in Terry's laughter, there was also something that he could only identify as love.

This was their paper. This was their thing. This was their place. And soon he would be asked to leave. He didn't know how he could stand it.

'Badge collectors read on', said Terry, and then he looked up at Ray. 'What the fuck's wrong with you?'

'Nothing.' When you grew up with brothers, you learned you always had to come straight back at them. 'What the fuck's wrong with you?'

Ray turned his back to Terry, busying himself at his desk, trying to straighten the bent spool on his tape recorder, and letting his hair fall forward so that his friend couldn't see the panic and pain in his eyes.

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FOUR

Leon's squat was in a large, decaying white house on a street of boarded-up buildings.

There was a kind of muddy moat around the perimeter of the house with wooden planks leading across it, like the ramshackle drawbridge of a rotting castle. On the ground floor the cracked and crumbling white plaster was almost obliterated by slogans.

WE ARE THE WRITING ON YOUR WALL. NO DRUGS IN HERE. CATS LIKE PLAIN CRISPS. Someone had changed a scrawled white NF into a bold black NAZIS OUT.

Leon slipped his hand into his leather jacket and felt for his key, glancing over his shoulder before he began negotiating his way across the planks. He had been in the squat for over a year now, ever since he had dropped out of the LSE and started full time on The Paper, but there was still a taste of fear in his mouth whenever he came back. You never knew when the bailiffs and cops would be coming. You never knew what was waiting for you.

As soon as he was inside the hallway a hairy unwashed face appeared at the top of the stairs, as Leon knew it would, as it always did. It wasn't just Leon. There was a creeping paranoia about squat life that never really went away. It seemed strangely familiar to Leon, because he thought it was not so different to the suspicion lurking behind the net curtains of the rich suburb where he had grown up.

'Someone's waiting for you,' said the hairy face at the top of the stairs. Leon was amazed. Nobody was ever waiting for him. 'Some straight,' said the hairy guy. 'Reckons he's your father.'

I knew it, Leon thought, his stomach sinking. I knew something bad was going to happen.

'The French guys don't like it,' said the face at the top of the stairs. We nearly didn't let him in.'

'You shouldn't have,' Leon said, trying to keep his voice calm, trying to pretend he was in control. He began climbing the stairs.

The squat was meant to be some kind of democracy, but in reality it was run by the French and Germans, who were older, who had been doing this for years, who talked about adventures in places like Paris and Amsterdam with such authority that Leon always fell silent, and felt like a kid who had seen nothing of the world. Leon was furious that his father should embarrass him in front of these great men.

At the top of the stairs he heard the usual babble of languages and sounds. The floorboards of the squat were bare and everything echoed and seemed louder than it should have. The Grateful Dead, turned up to ten, an argument about the murder of Leon Trotsky, another argument about a borrowed bottle of milk, and a woman's voice, apparently soothing a baby.

Leon wondered what his father would make of the overwhelming smell, for the squat was full of ripe scents, the trapped air behind the boarded-up windows reeking of dry rot, unwashed clothes, joss sticks and, seeping into everything, the odour of the vegetable soup that was permanently simmering on a big black stove.

The old man. Fuck it. Leon swallowed hard. When would it ever end? That fear of facing his father? That terror of seeing the disappointment in his eyes?

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He was by the sash window, his hands behind his back like the Duke of Edinburgh about to inspect the guard, staring down at the street. He was a tall, good-looking man seven days from his fifty-third birthday, calm and regal in his crisp Humphrey Bogart raincoat. He was standing. There was nowhere to sit down. There was nothing in the room but a pile of rucksacks and a few sleeping bags, one of which contained two sleeping teenage girls, curled up like kittens. 'What are you doing here, Dad?' The old man turned to him.

'Hello, Leon,' he said, as if he could hardly believe their luck at bumping into each other. T could ask you the same question, couldn't I?' The old man seemed perfectly relaxed. Leon had to hand it to him - how many of the boys he went to school with had fathers who could walk into a squat and not bat an eyelid? Leon remembered what his father had said to him when he was a boy, and delirious with excitement because his daddy had taken him to his newspaper office as a special treat during the long summer holiday. A journalist has to be at home everywhere, Leon. Remember that. The old man smiled, and placed a hand on Leon's shoulder, patting it twice, and then let it fall away when his son did not respond. 'Good to see you. Are you keeping well?' He looked up at Leon's hat but said nothing. Leon's parents had always been very understanding about the vagaries of fashion. Inmriatingly tolerant, in fact. None of his haircuts - the botched Ziggy Stardust, the failed Rod Stewart - had ever troubled them. That's their problem exactly, Leon thought. They can understand a bit of youthful rebellion. But they can't stomach the real thing. Leon grimaced. 'You really should have rung. This is not a good time. I'm going out - my friends will be waiting - at the Western World.' His father frowned, lifting a hand to Leon's bruised cheekbone, but not quite touching it. 'What on earth happened to your poor face?'

Leon wanted to say - oh, please don't fuss, I've had twenty years of it. But he couldn't resist - he wanted his father to know. He wanted his father to be proud of him. And when the fuck would that ever end? 'I was down there on Saturday. You know - Lewisham.' Leon relished the frightened look in the old man's face. 'The riot? What - they beat you?' Leon laughed at that. 'I just got clipped. A cop's knee.' His father was wide-eyed. Everything amazed him. 'His knee?'

Leon sighed with irritation. How could anyone know so little? 'He was on a horse, Dad. He was a cop on a horse'. Leon waited. He wanted some acknowledgement from his father. A bit of credit, that wouldn't have gone amiss. Some small nod of recognition that Leon had done a good thing by going to Lewisham and standing up to the racists. But the old man just exhaled with frustration.

'Why do you want to get mixed up in all that? A bunch of bower boys waving the flag, and another bunch of bower boys throwing bricks at them. What does that solve?'

Leon's face reddened with anger. 'You should understand. You of all people. They're Fascists, Dad. They have to be stopped. Isn't that what you did in the war?'

The old man raised his eyebrows. He almost smiled, and Leon blushed. He wished he could stop doing that.

'Is that what you think it was like at Monte Cassino? A punch-up on Lewisham High Street? What a lot you have to learn, my boy.'

This is why I left home, Leon thought, his eyes pricking with tears. The constant belittling. The just-not-fucking-getting-it. The never being good enough. The being told that I know nothing.

T don't care what you think,' Leon said, knowing he cared desperately. 'And why did you come? Why?'

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'Your mother asked me to,' said the old man, and Leon felt that twinge of hurt. So it wasn't his dad that was worried about him. It was her. His mother. 'Your mother doesn't get it. All your advantages and you end up living with a bunch of dossers.'

'Listen to you,' Leon said, mocking him now. 'The great enlightened liberal - sneering at the homeless.' 'I'm not sneering. I'm just - I'm just happy to see you.' 'Can you keep your voice down, please?' Leon said, indicating the sleeping girls, trying to show the old man that he was on his territory now. 'They've been up all night.'

His father peered at the girls as if noticing them for the first time.

'Who are they?' he said, keeping his voice down. There was a natural curiosity about him, and Leon thought perhaps that was why he was such a good journalist.

'Someone found them sleeping in the photo booth at Euston. They've come down from Glasgow.'

He wanted his dad to understand. He wanted him to see that these were Leon's battles - fighting racism, finding a roof for the homeless, confronting injustice - and they were just as important as the battles that his father had fought. But the old man just shook his head sadly, as if it was insane for children to be sleeping in photo booths, and it infuriated Leon. 'Dad, do you know what happens to most of the homeless kids who sleep in railway stations? They end up selling their bodies within a week.' 'They might be homeless, but you're not, are you, Leon?' He looked from the sleeping girls to his son. 'You're just playing at it.' Leon was having trouble controlling his heart, his breathing, his temper. He was at that point in a young man's life when every word from his father's mouth enraged him.

'I'm playing at nothing,' Leon said. 'They can't leave good housing empty. We're not going to stand for it any more. The homeless are fighting back.' 'But you choose to be homeless, Leon. Where's the sense in that? You give up your home for a slum. You give up your education for some music paper.'

Here we go, Leon thought. As if writing think pieces about the cod war is morally superior. As if sitting on your fanny and getting a degree somehow validates your existence.

'I've got a friend called Terry. His parents think he's done very well for himself by getting a job on a music paper.'

'I am sure Terry didn't have your advantages. I'm sure Terry wasn't at the London School of Economics until he dropped out in his first year. How can you throw all that away? Your grandfather was a taxi driver from Hackney. Do you know what he would have given for the chances you've had?'

The taxi driver from Hackney, Leon thought. It always came back to my father's father. The old man didn't know how fucking lucky he was - all he had to compete with was a taxi driver from Hackney who never quite lost his Polish accent. And what did Leon have to compete with? Leon had to compete with him.

One of the girls in the sleeping bag stirred, opened her eyes and went back to sleep. 'You shouldn't have come here, Dad,' Leon said.

T came because your mother's frantic,' the old man said, and Leon flinched at the feeling in his voice. 'She's worried sick. Where's your compassion for her, Leon?' His father looked around wildly. 'You think whoever owns this place is going to let this last for ever? One night soon someone is going to kick you out - and kick you bloody hard, my son.' Leon narrowed his eyes. 'We'll be ready for them.'

His father threw his hands in the air. Leon had seen that exasperated gesture so many times. It said the things I have to put up with!

'Oh, grow up, Leon. You think these people are going to change the world? Take a good whiff. They have trouble changing their socks.'

'They're committed to something bigger than themselves. They care.'

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'They care,' his father echoed. 'One day you'll see that the people who care, the people who profess love for the masses, are the most heartless bastards in the world.' Then his voice was almost begging. 'Look - I was like you. Thought I knew it all. You've got so much time, Leon. You don't realise how much time you have.'

Round and round. Never ending. It had been just like this in the last days of home, Leon thought. Bossing him around, dressing it up as reasoned debate. Until one of them - always Leon, now he thought about it - slammed away from the dinner table and went to his room. But he wasn't living at home any more. His father did not understand. That was all over.

'You just want me to be what I was, Dad - a good little student you can boast about to all your friends.'

His father shook his head, and Leon felt a flicker of fear - he looked like he was in some kind of pain. 'No - I just want you to have a happy life. Dropping out - that's not the way, that can never be the way.' Happiness! Now Leon had heard everything. 'Life's not just about happiness, is it? I can't go back to my old life, Dad. I can't sit around with a bunch of privileged middle-class kids when there are people sleeping on the street, when there are racists beating up Pakistani shopkeepers, when they are' marching through the streets making their Nazi salutes. I can't pretend it's not happening.' 'Come home,' his father said. That's what it came down to in the end. Never hearing a word he said. Wanting things to be the way they were, when they could never be that way again. Leon shrugged. T am home.'

'Oh, you stupid little boy,' his father said, and Leon was shocked to see him filling up with tears, turning his face away, staring out the window at nothing. Leon couldn't stand it. He couldn't stand to see the old man so upset. He felt like putting his arms around him, but just as he was about to do so a couple of the French guys appeared in the doorway and stood there with their arms folded, making it clear that this man was unwanted in this place.

Leon's father felt their presence, glanced at them waiting in the doorway and nodded, as if he understood.

The old man hugged him and pulled away quickly. Leon felt like patting him, or saying something to reassure him, or telling him it had to be this way, but he didn't know where to start.

Leon walked his father to the door in silence. They shook hands, as formal as strangers who had not really had a chance to talk, and Leon watched the old man turn up the collar of his Humphrey Bogart raincoat and carefully cross the muddy moat.

You were meant to keep the front door shut and locked, but Leon watched his dad as he walked down the boarded-up street, and he kept watching until he had disappeared round the corner, and by then all the anger had faded to this sort of flat, empty sorrow. Leon couldn't see a reason why they would ever meet again. He closed the door of the squat and began setting all the locks. The office emptied and the big white clock by the reception desk seemed to get louder by the minute. But still Ray tarried at his desk, fretting over the damaged tape recorder, huddled over it, trying to straighten the deformed spool.

Pressing start. Watching the thing wobble. Straightening it with his thumb. Pressing stop. Pressing with his thumb again - pressing harder this time… and then the spool snapped.

It came away with a crisp, sickening sound and flew across the room. Ray gasped with shock, staring at the jagged black stump that was left behind. Bad, this is so bad. So much for tracking down John Lennon, Ray thought. I never even made it out of the office. Pathetic. I deserve to be given the boot. His friends were gone now and Ray ached for their presence -

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for someone, anyone, to tell him what to do next. He stared helplessly at the useless tape machine and he realised that he knew this feeling. This feeling of being completely and totally alone. He was eleven years old and standing in front of a classroom full of children who had already had time to make friends, form alliances and learn how to grin knowingly when they saw a new kid who was trying not to cry. Too late. Always too late.

It was easy for his two brothers. John was four years older, tough, athletic, afraid of nothing. And his younger brother, Robbie, was only five and just starting school. He wouldn't know anything but this strange new place.

But Ray was at that awkward age. He looked different to the other boys and girls. His hair was still cut in a brutal short back and sides, he was wearing grey flannel short trousers and a short-sleeve white nylon shirt, and he was still sporting the tie and blazer of his old school.

It was the summer of 1969, and Ray Keeley was dressed like Harold Macmillan.

Although his new classmates also wore a nominal school uniform, compared to Ray they were Carnaby Street peacocks.

Long hair curled dangerously over the collars of paisley shirts, or it was cropped to the point of baldness. School ties had knots thick enough for Roger Moore. Many of the girls had hiked their regulation skirts up to just below their knickers of regulation navy blue. And lounging right at the back of the class, there were boys in pink shirts. Pink shirts! On boys! Flipping heck!

Ray had been in England for a month. Nowhere had ever felt less like home. 'Ray is from Hong Kong where his father was in the police force,' announced the teacher. She picked up a ruler and slapped it twice against a map of the world. 'Now, who knows what Hong Kong is?' The class chanted as one, making Ray jump. 'One of the pink bits, miss!' 'And what are the pink bits?' 'The pink bits are ours, miss!'

But Ray felt that nothing belonged to him - not the Chinese place they had left behind, or the army bases in Cyprus and Germany where his family had lived before that, and certainly not this strange suburban town where the boys and girls were dolled up as if they were going to a fancy-dress party.

A skinhead child was assigned to look after Ray but deserted him as soon as the bell went for morning playtime.

On the far side of the playground Ray could see his big brother John kicking a ball around with some of the lads. His kid brother Robbie was running in circles with a pack of little fellows, giggling like crazy. Ray stood there, not knowing where to go, what to do, or even where to put his hands. But then something happened that changed everything. Someone started singing.

It was the chorus from 'Hey Jude'. On and on. Voices joined in. And then there was another chant - the opening bars of 'All You Need Is Love'.

The children kept on playing. The football and gossip didn't stop, did not even pause for breath. The conkers and hopscotch continued. But they sang as they played.

There were more tunes, more chants - yeah, yeah, yeah - 'She Loves You' - and more children raising their voices in these songs that they all knew better than any hymn, better than the National Anthem.

Songs they had grown up singing, the soundtrack to all those Sixties childhoods. It was only the Beatles. Always the Beatles. As if the times that these children grew up in began and ended with John, Paul, George and Ringo. And soon the entire playground was singing and Ray Keeley stepped out among them, his senses reeling, surrounded by the music, and a world unlike any he had known before. A world of shared feelings.

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Years later he wondered if he had imagined it all - the first day at the strange school, the desperate attempt to hold back the tears, the sight of his big brother playing football with his new friends somehow underlining Ray's loneliness, and then out of nowhere the playground full of children singing Beatles songs. Certainly he never saw it happen again.

But he knew that it was real. He knew that it had really happened. He had felt it. The magic that can set you free.

And sometimes Ray felt like his entire life was about trying to get back to that moment, to recover that day when suddenly it didn't matter that he knew no one and his clothes were all wrong, that schoolyard in 1969 where the children sang, na-na-na, yeah-yeah-yeah and love-love-love, love is all you need. The office wasn't empty. Ray should have known. Their office was never quite empty.

Music thundered from inside the review room, making the panel of glass in the door rattle. Ray pressed his face against the glass and saw that Skip Jones was in there. He would probably be in there all night, writing the lead album review for next week's issue. By hand.

Despite all the modern red plastic Olivettis in the office, Skip Jones always chose to write by hand. You would see him in odd empty corners of the office, or in the review room, his long giraffe-like limbs hunched over a tatty notebook, and the fact that he was left-handed and had to wrap his hand around his leaky Biro made the process seem all the more awkward and tortured and strange.

Yet Skip Jones still wrote the pants off everyone else at The Paper, effortlessly constructing this cool, pristine, sceptical prose that seemed perfect for the age, and he was the closest thing The Paper had to a legend.

Ray hated to disturb Skip Jones. But if anyone knew where Lennon would be tonight, it was Skip. He paused, working up the courage. Then Ray let himself into the review room with a diffident smile, his hair falling forward.

Skip didn't notice him at first. He was lost in the music, consumed by his writing, surrounded by a forest of dead cigarettes that he had half-smoked and then carefully stood on their filter tips, allowing them to burn down to a bendy cone of ash.

Ray watched him work, wondering what the music was - twin lead guitars, a world-weary nasal vocal that was completely contemporary, but with a dreamy quality that was out of step with what was going on.

Ray loved to watch Skip work. It restored his faith, it made him feel that they were doing something worthwhile and important. Watching Skip made Ray feel that the music hadn't died.

Skip leaned back in his chair, lit a cigarette and noticed Ray. He grinned and motioned him further into the room, not quite making eye contact for, while Skip Jones was the best writer at The Paper, he was the shyest man in the world. Looking you in the eye was Skip's personal Kryptonite. Ray smiled gratefully and pulled up the room's other chair. 'Ray Keeley,' Skip said. 'Wild.'

Skip handed him the cover of the album he was reviewing. Marquee Moon by Television. Ray shook his head - never heard of it. Skip closed his eyes and nodded emphatically, indicating that this was the real deal. 'Man, what's the biggest selling album of the year?' Skip said. 'Don't know,' Ray said. T guess it's still Hotel California!

'Wild,' Skip smiled, carefully standing his newly lit cigarette on its filter tip. 'Laurel Canyon cowboys - cod country that the Byrds did first and harmonies that the Beach Boys did better.' He chuckled, and Ray laughed along with Skip, even though he had always been quite fond of the Eagles, and it felt like a bit of a betrayal. 'Well, sorry, boys - Television are going to kick your LA arses all the way back to the dude ranch.' Ray's eyes shone with admiration. He thought that Skip Jones

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looked like a buccaneer. A buccaneer who had been shipwrecked with Keith Richards and a big bag of drugs.

Skip was freakishly tall, alarmingly thin, deathbed white, and if you had seen him loping by, a stack of albums stickered with the words Promotional Copy Only: Not For Sale under his arm and about to be sold, you might have thought he was a homeless person, or a genius who could not live as mere mortals did. You would have been right on both counts.

On the rare nights when he actually went to bed, Skip Jones slept on a succession of sofas and floors across north and west London. Skip often lacked a home, but never a roof. Too many people worshipped him.

By day, Skip lurked in whatever spare corner of The Paper was free - he had no office of his own, and didn't want one - that's how totally rock and roll Skip was. He seemed to embody the very essence of the music. And on crumpled notepads, scraps of paper, the backs of press releases and the inside of empty cigarette packets, Skip wrote - by tormented hand, in laborious, cack-handed pencil -the most glittering words about music that anyone had ever read.

Skip was wearing the only clothes he seemed to own - torn black leather trousers, a red leather biker's jacket and the kind of ruffled blouson that might be suitable if you found yourself fighting a duel with rapiers at dawn. He wore these elegant rags every day, in every kind of weather. Ray thought Skip looked like some kind of rock-and-roll cavalier, when everyone else was a roundhead.

Skip's trousers were ripped at the crutch and sometimes at editorial meetings his meat and two veg were given an unexpected airing. Hardened rock chicks who thought nothing of giving head to a member of Dr Feelgood backstage at the Rainbow blushed to the roots of their dyed hair, but Skip was oblivious.

When he walked through the streets of London, rough boys with feather cuts and diamond-motif tank tops and flared jeans flapping above their steel-capped boots lobbed rocks at him. The wide world scorned him as a freak. But at The Paper, Skip was revered. It wasn't just Ray. Leon loved Skip. Terry loved Skip. He was the reason they all wanted to work for The Paper.

Skip Jones had started writing for The Paper when he was a bleary-eyed dropout from Balliol and the youngest writer on Oz, and his waspish reflections on the music's glorious dead - Jimi Hendrix, Brian Jones, Jim Morrison, Nick Drake - and walking wounded - Lou Reed, Brian Wilson, Syd Barrett, Iggy Pop, Dag Wood - did more than anything or anyone to help Kevin White drag The Paper from underground rag to mainstream music magazine. 'You like the new bands?' Skip said. 'Not your thing, right?'

Ray smiled politely. He didn't really have to explain anything to Skip. Skip understood.

T like them,' Skip said. 'Some of them. But what they're doing, what they're devoting their careers to, Eddie Cochran did in less than two minutes. Check it out, man. "Summertime Blues" - one minute fifty-nine. They want back to basics? Eddie Cochran did it first. And you can't slag off the old guard when you're stealing their riffs. I mean, where did the Clash lift the riff for "1977"?' 'The Kinks,' Ray said. '"You Really Got Me".'

Skip smiled slyly. 'So what are you into these days? Not Led Zeppelin?'

'My brother liked all that. I liked - I don't know - the folky stuff they did. You know, "Tangerine", "White Summer/Black Mountain Side".'

Ray didn't say that his brother had died and the records were gathering dust in a bedroom that his parents had locked. He didn't tell Skip Jones that. They didn't talk about their lives. Every conversation they had was about music. Ray supposed that Skip must have a family somewhere. But he never mentioned them. Over the din of the music, what they talked about was music.

'Big Joni Mitchell fans, Page and Plant,' Skip said. 'Everyone ignores that. But if you like that acoustic side of Led Zeppelin, you got to check out some of those folk boys. Davy Graham. Bert

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Jansch and John Renbourn, the Pentangle boys. Leo Kottke. John Fahey - a mad genius, the acoustic Hendrix. And John Martyn. You know John Martyn? He's our Dylan. Don't be put off because the guy's got a beard, man.'

'Beards don't bother me,' Ray said, struggling to commit the names to memory. He had to listen to these people. There was great music out there that he had never even heard of.

'And then you have to go back further,' Skip was saying. 'To the blues. To the music that's behind our music - if you know what I mean.' Somehow Ray knew what he meant.

'Check out Son House.' A shy, sideways glance. Ray nodded. He would definitely check out Son House. 'Charley Patton,' Skip said. 'Asie Payton. The Delta Blues. It all comes from the same source. That's what the special ones understand. The blood knot. Where it all gets mixed up - black and white, the city and the country. They get it. All music comes from the same place. Elvis understood it. And Dylan. And Lennon too.' Ray took a breath.

T need to find him, Skip. John Lennon, I mean. He's in town. White wants me to find him and interview him.'

That shy, sly smile, looking at a point on the ceiling. 'A world exclusive? A scoop?' 'That's it. Yeah. You know - like proper journalism.'

Skip nodded. 'They're all in town tonight,' he said. 'John Lennon… Dag Wood. It's a strange vibe, man.' He smiled, peeking at Ray out of the corner of his eye. 'Spirits are abroad.'

Ray remembered that Skip had once discovered Dag Wood turning blue in an empty bath in Detroit. Or maybe it was the other way round. It was a bad scene, anyway. Skip knew everything. He had met everyone.

'Where should I go tonight, Skip?' There was urgency in Ray's voice now. He saw he still had a faint chance. 'If you were me -where would you go?' Skip considered. 'If I were you, and I was going out tonight, then I'd try the Speakeasy. Or maybe the Roundhouse.'

Ray was doubtful. 'You really think that Lennon will be in those places?'

Skip frowned. 'John Lennon? I doubt it, man. But you'll be able to buy some great gear in the toilets.'

Ray sighed. He couldn't help himself. He remembered that although Skip had met everyone and knew everything, it was said he had trouble boiling a kettle. The banalities of life eluded Skip. He was operating on some higher astral plane. 'Yes, but where will he be? John, I mean?'

But before Skip could hazard a guess, the door to the review room burst open. A small, indignant woman in glasses glared at the pair of them. Ray recognised her, she was from the magazine across the floor, Country Matters.

She bustled over to the turntable and angrily pulled the needle from Marquee Moon, making the vinyl screech in protest.

'Have some consideration for others,' she said, red-faced with fury. 'You're not the only ones working late, you know.' She strode back across the review room, pausing at the door. 'And get some fresh air!'

When she was gone, Ray and Skip looked at each other for a moment. And then they laughed until it hurt. 'Get some fresh air!' Skip Jones said. 'Wild!' Misty drove them to the place where they spent their nights. Terry felt his heart pounding with joy. He loved it here. He thought that it looked like the end of the world.

The old Covent Garden flower market had been torn down and carted away. Almost nothing remained. Now the area reminded Terry of the bombsites he had seen as a kid, all ploughed mud and smashed buildings and gaping holes in the earth. But every night, something stirred among the rubble.

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'Here they come,' Misty said.

Terry and Misty sat on the roof of her dad's car in a scrappy piece of wasteland, watching men in dinner jackets and women in evening gowns emerge from the darkness and carefully pick their way through the ruins. The opera-goers.

Terry and Misty liked to watch this swanky crew on their way to the Royal Opera House on Bow Street - the men suave in their dinner jackets and bow ties, looking all David Niven and James Bond, the women holding up the hems of their long dresses, dripping jewels, every one a Princess Grace of Monaco, and laughing as if crossing the ruins of Covent Garden was a great game.

A woman in a red dress and pearls waved at them, and Terry and Misty waved back.

The opera crowd had a friendly relationship with the feral-looking young people who flocked to see bands play in a basement club on Neal Street. Terry thought that it was because they were all there for the same reason. They were all there for the music.

'This was a garden once,' Misty said. She liked to lecture him. But he didn't mind. He liked it when she told him things. 'Did you know that, Tel? They grew fruit and flowers here. That's where the name comes from. Covent Garden. It really was a garden.'

'And now it's a bombsite,' he said. 'Let's go and see if Dag's arrived yet.' 'It must have been so beautiful,' she said.

Terry let loose a Kung Fu cry and jumped from the roof of the car. Before he hit the ground he lashed out at some imaginary enemy with the side of his foot, and chopped the air once-twice-three times.

'Bruce Lee,' he said proudly, and his girlfriend smiled at him in the darkness.

Then they looked up as the sky cracked, the heavens opened and the rains came down.

Within seconds they were both soaked. A jagged bolt of lightning snaked across the skyline. It was not the weather of summer. The sudden storm seemed to herald something momentous, some elemental force being unleashed, a change in the universe.

Terry and Misty held hands, laughed out loud and turned their faces to the sky, delirious with life.

And five thousand miles away, behind the gates of a great house in Memphis, Tennessee, a forty-two-year-old man was taking his dying breath.

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FIVE

The noise - the incredible level of sound - that was what Terry noticed first. It roared out of the basement of the Western World, blasted through the open door where a large bald man in black stood guard, and seemed to rattle the night air, shaking the NHS fillings of the soaked and bedraggled queue waiting to be let inside. Someone was live on stage. And Terry was suddenly aware of the beat of his heart.

He took Misty's hand, feeling giddy with history. Once the Western World had been an illegal drinking joint. Later it was a strip club. Then it was a gay bar. And now it belonged to them. Now it was their turn.

Everyone in the queue was dressed up in the fashion of their tribe, and Terry found something comforting about all those emblems of rebellion - the Fuck-you-to-Hell-and-back heels and torn black tights on the girls, the bollock-crunching skinny trousers and big boots on the boys, the leather jackets and short, spiked hair for everybody, dried out by talcum powder and kept vertical with Vaseline, as though an electric shock had just run through the veins of every one of them. These were his people. Beyond the tribal piercings, the make-up like wounds and bruises - Panda eyes, red slit mouths - Terry recognised many of the faces, and he felt a strange kind of warmth inside. It was good to be among your own kind.

'Or we could go somewhere else,' Misty said, tugging on the sleeve of his Oxfam jacket.

He stared at her. You never knew what she was going to say next. 'What are you talking about?' Even standing outside the Western World, you had to raise your voice to be heard above the din.

Her eyes were huge with excitement. 'We could take the car. Drive all night. Be in the Highlands when the sun's coming up.'

For a second he was speechless. Didn't she understand the importance of tonight? Didn't she get it?

'But Dag's coming tonight,' he said. 'He's going to be waiting for me. To meet us!

Terry remembered the moment in a Berlin bar when he had shown Misty's picture to Dag. She was clowning around in a photo booth, sitting on Terry's lap, but you could still tell how special she was. Dag had nodded a restrained approval. 'Crazy lady,' he had said, and Terry's heart had flooded with gratitude. That's right, Dag. Crazy lady.

'Yeah, yeah,' she said. 'But it would be just like Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty in On the Road! She thought that would tempt him. She knew how much he loved that book. 'Sal and Dean driving into Mexico as the sun's coming up, Terry. We could drive all night - just go!

She meant it. He knew she meant it. Crazy lady was dead right. And although it was crazy - Dag Wood might be already inside! -Terry couldn't be angry with her. This craziness had been one of the reasons that he had fallen for her so heavily.

He remembered the early days, just before new year, when the rest of the world was still worn out by Christmas, and her ex-boyfriend, the old boy, had stood vigil outside Terry's bedsit, crying his heart out in the snow, and they had sneaked past him giggling, and run around London as if they owned it - jumping

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over fences, scaling walls, climbing trees in royal parks in the middle of the night, wandering across the pitch in some empty football stadium. She wasn't like any girl he had ever known. But he wasn't tempted to turn and walk away from the Western World. They had the rest of their lives to drive all night. 'Come on, Misty,' he said gently. 'Dag's waiting.' And she smiled at him, not minding at all, and he loved her.

They walked to the front of the queue, and Terry was proud in the knowledge that their names were permanently on the guest list of this special place. He clocked all the familiar slogans of sedition scrawled on shirts, trousers and school jackets. ANARCHY. DESTROY. CROYDON SUCKS.

A wild-eyed apparition emerged from the queue. He wore a suit jacket that seemed to have been made out of a Union Jack. His two front teeth were missing. 'Terry, Terry,' he lisped, 'he is here! He walks among us! Dag Wood is in the building! I saw him go in!'

Brainiac was one of the veterans of last summer. Terry had first seen him in front of the stage at a Clash gig with blood all over his face, giving him the appearance of a cannibal at teatime. Some dancing partner had just taken a bite out of Brainiac's nose. Brainiac didn't care, he just grinned foolishly, showing his gappy teeth, as if losing the odd limb was all part of the fun. Some said that Brainiac had invented vertical dancing because there was just so little space to move in their subterranean haunts. The only way was up and down. Nobody knew where Brainiac came from - he seemed to appear fully formed, as if the madness and the Union Jack jacket had always been there, as if he had always been Brainiac.

Terry had heard that Brainiac had once been Brian O'Grady, and that he had come to the Western World via a large London Irish family, a scholarship to a public school (apparently Brainiac's IQ was off the radar, and Terry sort of believed it) and then, after his first nervous breakdown, a mental hospital. But nobody knew for sure, and it didn't matter anyway. Brian was gone and Brainiac was here now. They were all here now. 'The great Dag Wood is in the building,' Brainiac insisted, his lingers clawing at Terry's Oxfam jacket, sweat and rain dripping.ill over his ecstatic face. 'The only man to get up their kaftans at Woodstock. Your piece - extreme gonzo - if I may say so.' 'Is he?' Terry said. 'Is he really in there? Dag?'

It seemed too good to be true. But Brainiac nodded excitedly,,md Terry patted him on the back of his Union Jack jacket, thankful for the happy news. Then he stared at his hand. It was covered in grime.

'You may come in with us,' Misty said, and Brainiac fell into step behind them, babbling happily.

Terry spat on his hands and rubbed them together. Brainiac had been wearing the red, white and blue jacket the night he almost lost his nose, and it was filthy beyond belief now. Terry didn't say anything because Brainiac was only about seventeen years old and he liked him a lot. And Brainiac was one of the originals. But as they moved closer to the front of the queue, Terry saw with a sinking feeling that the crowd was changing.

It had been so good at the start. The best time of his life. For the second half of last year and the first half of this one, all through that blazing summer of 1976 and the freezing winter that followed, Terry could come to the Western World and know every face in the club. It felt as if everyone was a musician, writer, photographer, band manager, fashion designer - or at least, that's what they were trying to be, as they all searched for an escape route from their old lives and stifling normality. Their own private gin factory, Terry thought. Brainiac himself talked endlessly about the perfect band that existed in his head. They were all hungry for new experience, starved of life, ready for anything.

There were just a few of them back then. One night Terry had watched the Jam play at the Western World when the only other people in the audience were three members of the Clash and Brainiac. Afterwards Brainiac and Terry had helped Paul, Bruce, Rick and Weller's dad load their gear into the van for the long

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drive back to Woking. It was a good night. But that was when all of the new bands were unsigned. That was when they were all just starting. Now most of the groups had records out, and some of them - the ones that didn't have any ideological objections to the show - had even appeared on Top of the Pops.

Terry thought that what was so perfect about the early days was that it felt like they were all in this thing - whatever this thing was - together. But now he couldn't help the Jam to load their van. They had roadies to do that sort of thing, and he had his fragile dignity to preserve. They were professionals now, or pretending to be.

Terry knew those early days had been strangely innocent, no matter how many outraged headlines there were in the newspapers. Although they had all dressed up as if they were ready for a fight or a fuck or both, there had been a real sense of community. But now there were mean faces waiting outside the Western World, and they glared at Terry and Misty with naked hostility as they bypassed the queue. 'Careful, careful - strangers,' Brainiac hissed at Terry's shoulder, seeming on the edge of tears. 'Strangers are here.'

Out of the corner of his eye, Terry registered three youths who didn't spike their hair but shaved it - ferocious, gleaming bald heads, like extremist skinheads. One of them was tall and sickly thin, the other beer-drinker porky, and the third built like a refrigerator. Through dull, sullen eyes they watched Terry walk by with Misty holding his hand.

'What else you get for Christmas?' one of them shouted, and the others chortled in perfect harmony.

Terry didn't know what it meant exactly, but he knew it was an insult. And he knew now who they were. The Dagenham Dogs.

The tall and thin one was called Junior, and the nearest thing this crew had to a leader. Under Junior's right eye there was a tattoo, or rather three tattoos - a trio of dark teardrops, the colour of melting black ice, small, medium and large, growing in size as they ran down his face. There were about fifty or sixty Dagenham Dogs, all from the I midlands of the East End-Essex border country. They followed and fought for a band called the Sewer Rats the way - less than.\ year ago - they had followed and fought for West Ham United.

The Sewer Rats were decent middle-class boys - well-spoken political science graduates who gave thoughtful interviews where I hey talked about oligarchy and permanent revolution, Mao and the MC5.

Terry had gone on the road with them and found them charming. But there was something in the toe-tapping, bitch-slapping brutalism of their music that was irresistible to what Ian Dury had defined to Terry as lawless brats from council flats. Not the ones like Terry, who knew he would never be as tough as he wanted to be. The real thing. The real dead-end kids.

You saw Junior and the Dagenham Dogs at Sewer Rat gigs, slamming into each other in front of the stage - a strange new thing, something that had never been seen at shows before, a violent evolution of Brainiac's pogo dance - fighting with each other, fighting with anyone, shrieking at the moon, covered in gore, nothing to lose. You were seeing more and more of their kind around. They didn't care about the art school rhetoric of the new music, or theories about teenage boredom, or Vivienne Westwood T-shirts. They were here for the riot. They were here to have a laugh, to get out of their heads, to smash the place up if the mood took them.

Terry didn't look at them as they eye-balled him from the queue. They scared him. If they had said something about Misty then his code of honour would have insisted that he confront them, and accept a good kicking, for he knew he had no chance in a scrap with the Dogs. But they didn't, and he was hugely relieved. 'Just ignore them,' Misty said.

'You think I'm scared of them?' Terry said, keeping his voice down.

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Ray was waiting for them at the door, looking uneasy.

'Need your tape recorder,' Ray said, his words coming out in a rush. 'Mine's buggered.' His hair fell down and he didn't push it back. 'Have you got your tape recorder? And some batteries. And a C-90 tape.' Terry looked at him. "Why's that then?' he said. 'Because I'm going to interview John Lennon.'

'It's in the car,' Misty said, taking out the keys and handing them to Terry.

Terry contemplated the keys. 'Why do you want to talk to John Lennon? In seven years it's going to be 1984. You think anyone's going to remember the Beatles by 1984?'

The queue began easing past them into the club. Make-up streaming, bodies steaming. Ray sighed. 'Can I just have that tape recorder?'

'Come inside for a minute,' Terry pleaded, slipping the keys inside his Oxfam jacket. 'Have a beer. Then we'll go and get the tape. You know who's going to be down here tonight? You know who I'm going to introduce you to? Dag Wood! Ray was unimpressed. "What do I want to meet Dag Wood for?' Terry looked hurt. 'Dag was at Woodstock!'

Ray laughed. 'Yeah, where he was bottled off stage.' He looked at Terry and Misty. He was anxious to get on with it, but in a way he didn't mind delaying his quest. Because even if he found John Lennon, he didn't know how he could ever talk to him.

'All right, one beer,' Ray said, and he had to smile at the delight on Terry's face. The three of them went inside, past the bouncer, through the lager-stained lobby and into the darkness. Terry could feel the music hammering his eardrums, and then the noise began to translate into a song - it was Billy Blitzen who was on stage downstairs, doing his big number, 'Shoot Up, Everybody'.

Juddering Eddie Cochran riffs made Terry's jawbone clench, and his eyes misted over with bliss. It was like getting off the plane in some exotic country. You were hit in the face by this other world - the noise and the heat and the smell of sweat and Red Stripe and ganja. Suddenly there was less air to breathe. And Billy Hlitzen was live on stage.

Five years ago Billy had been in a band that Terry had loved -ihe Lost Boys, native New Yorkers who sang about scoring junk uptown and girlfriends crying in shower stalls, all that Manhattan Babylon stuff but given a sassy mid-Seventies sheen, and stuffed into platform boots. And Billy was a friend of Terry's now, maybe his best friend outside The Paper - one of those Americans, a graduate of CBGBs and Max's Kansas City and the Bottom Line, who were flocking to town, actually moving to London, sensing the gold rush to come. They could all hang out together, Terry thought happily. Dag Wood and Misty and Ray and Billy Blitzen. It was going to be a perfect night.

Pierced, painted faces stared out of the gloom. Faces shone in the darkness for a moment and then were gone. There was Brainiac, grinning like a mad man, taking alternate swigs from the cans of Red Stripe he held in each hand. And there was the nearly famous Grace Fury, the girl of the moment. Grace Fury - red hair, black tights, some sort of PVC corset and a tartan mini-kilt that would have just about covered her pants, if she had been wearing any. Terry felt Misty's hot breath on his neck and tried not to stare at where the skirt ended and the legs began. Maybe Grace could hang out with them too.

A crush of bodies pressed against him. Some kid who looked barely into his teens had shredded his school blazer and put it back together with safety pins. Because the grown-up world was too slow and stupid to sell it to them, and because they had no money, most of their stuff was customised or home-made. Like Terry, many of them were wearing a dead man's jacket.

Maybe Grace Fury's gear was from the far end of the King's Road, but all around him were mail-order catalogue T-shirts subverted with rips, pins and slogans borrowed from records by the Clash - WHITE RIOT, UNDER HEAVY MANNERS,

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1977 - and rendered with toy printing-press stencil sets or wonky Biro. As they moved slowly through the crowd, Terry could feel Misty behind him, her arms around his waist, and Ray trying to stick close by his side. According to Terry's calculations, Ray was only the third person with long hair ever to enter the Western World. The other two had been Jimmy Page and Robert Plant, who had turned up on separate nights to check out this new scene. Because nobody knew if this music was going to dominate everything for the next ten years or fade away to nothing, nobody knew if this time next year these bands would all be signed and rich and famous, or signing on the dole, or dead. That was what was so wonderful, Terry believed. Nobody had a clue what was going to happen next. They went down to the basement, feeling the semi-derelict wooden staircase creaking dangerously beneath them, having to step over a young man in a Lewis Leather and a pink tutu who was comatose at the bottom, and then there it was - the basement of the Western World. Terry had to smile.

In front of the bouncing mob, Billy Blitzen was on a low stage the size of a snooker table - Billy dapper and beautiful in his soiled three-piece suit, his pomped-up black hair flying, letting his Fender swing at his side while he stabbed an imaginary syringe in his arm. 'Whooh!' Billy sang, and the crowd went stark raving mental. 'Shoot up, everybody!'

Then Billy grabbed the guitar's neck and tried to do a Chuck Berry duck walk in the confined space. Terry's eyes shone with joy.

Billy's group, the P45s, were a pick-up band of jobbing local musicians, who had chopped their hair off and dyed it metallic silver. This time last year Terry guessed they had looked like pub rockers - all shiny-arsed suits and Dr Feelgood swagger and a snout permanently on the go. Unless Billy got a deal, this time next year they would again have different trousers and haircuts. But Terry knew that Billy was happy with them because they all knew their five chords and where to buy drugs in Chalk Farm, and they didn't matter anyway, for Billy Blitzen was essentially a solo act now, well on his way to perfecting his stage persona as the Dean Martin of the new music. 'Whooh! Shoot up, everybody!'

Needles had yet to really surface in London, but to a New Yorker like Billy they were old hat, a way of life, something to brag about, sing about, and a way of pulling rank over all the little London speed freaks and spliff smokers. The Americans already knew how hard drugs could be, and they flaunted that knowledge like a college degree. Terry sang along at the top of his voice to 'Shoot Up, Everybody' and he couldn't hear a word. Needles still had a dark glamour for him. He hadn't seen any yet.

'There's Dag] Misty said, starting to jump up and down. And Terry gawped at her, momentarily stunned. Jumping up and down? He thought she only did that for him.

Yet then Terry was looking at Dag Wood and grinning shyly. It was really happening, the moment Terry had yearned for all the way through Berlin. Dag Wood - hero, rock star, friend - was in the basement of the Western World, looking like an exiled king or something. There he was at the back of the basement, as far away from the stage as he could get, in the only place where the crowd thinned out and you could sit down at a rickety table. Dag's face looking like it had been hacked out of granite, his lank white hair pushed back, his huge bug eyes surveying the heaving basement as if it was his own underground fiefdom. His silk shirt was half off, and his muscles rippled. Holding court, that's what he's doing, Terry thought. Dag was surrounded by people - his musicians, his slick chubby manager, a dark-haired German woman called Christa, who was maybe his girlfriend or maybe his drug dealer or maybe both, plus some of the bolder regulars who had worked up the nerve to approach their tables. Everybody else, the ones who were not watching Billy Blitzen, was trying to be cool and not quite managing it. Kids who never changed the

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bored-witless expression on their face when they spilled a beer over a Buzzcock or peed next to a Sex Pistol or stood on the toe of a Strangler, stared with swoony wonder at Dag Wood - the Godfather, the thorn in the side of the Woodstock generation, the man who had started it all. And Dag Wood saw Terry Warboys and laughed.

'You did it, didn't you?' Dag said, coming over to him, the voice surprisingly deep and booming. He slapped Terry's shoulder so hard it hurt. 'You got me the cover. You are a good writer, man.' Terry's face ached with the grinning.

Oh, he knew how it worked. He knew that he had the ability to make rock stars his temporary friend if he got them the cover of The Paper. But Dag was different. He wasn't some snot-nosed opportunist who had been a prog rocker with a mullet six months ago. Dag was the real deal - he was crawling across broken glass in Texas biker bars when the Beades were sitting at the Maharishi's feet, spitting blood and telling the world to shut its fucking mouth long before it was fashionable. And they had really connected in Berlin, Terry believed. What he had with Dag was like the thing he had with Billy Blitzen. They respected each other's talent.

'Hello, stretch,' Dag said to Misty, who was hovering at Terry's shoulder. 'How are you tonight?'

And Terry thought - stretch?What does that mean? Is it - what? Because she's tall or something? Terry thought - I don't get it. 'Love the dress,' murmured Dag, narrowing his eyes.

Misty was laughing brightly and Terry was telling Dag her name, and then he was trying to introduce Ray, but his friend hung back, half-turning away with a fixed grin on his face, his hands stuffed deep into his Levi's, letting his fair hair fall into his face, hiding behind it, and Terry felt a twinge of annoyance and disappointment. Ray had a way of just shrinking into the background when he felt uncomfortable. And it was too late anyway, because by then Dag had taken Misty's hand and was guiding her past the sticky tables occupied by his musicians who - Terry couldn't help noticing - casually sized up Misty as they sucked from cans and rolled joints and scanned the club to see who they might take back to their hotel tonight. As if, Terry thought bleakly, she was just another girl.

Dag's manager - a greasy New York type with cropped white hair who Terry now realised he had always disliked - vacated the seat next to Dag so that Misty could sit down. 'Welcome to London, Dag,' Terry said, having to almost shout it. 'You want a drink or something?' He paused, trying to be a good host. This was all so new. 'They got Red Stripe and Special Brew.'

'Man,' Dag said, drawing it out, not taking his unblinking eyes from Misty's smiling face. 'I'm going to have exactly what you're having.'

Dag's manager laughed at that, and Terry flushed in the darkness, and he did not like that laugh at all. But he was paralysed, standing there like an idiot, uncertain what he should think, let alone do. He was off the map and in uncharted waters. Then Dag did this thing that made Terry's blood freeze. Dag lifted his legs as if in slow motion, and eased them across Misty, so that his black leather-clad calves were resting on the top of her thighs. The pair of them looked like a weary man of the world about to give a lesson in life to a bright head girl. And Terry thought - now what the fuck does that mean? Is that like a sex thing? What's going on here? He looked at Ray, but Ray looked away.

Billy Blitzen and the P45s had left the stage and dub reggae was playing. Prince Jammy, maybe. You only heard two kinds of music at the Western World - the live stuff slashed out by the bands on stage, which was the fastest music in the world, and the dub reggae records played by the DJ, which was surely the slowest. It put you in a trance. Misty was still talking to Dag. Terry didn't know what to do. He glanced up at the DJ box and the DJ seemed to stare back at him, impassive and unreadable behind giant Superfly shades and a huge matted tangle of dreadlocks. Misty always claimed that there was an affinity between the white kids

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in the Western World and young Jamaicans, and that's why there was always dub reggae on the sound system. But Terry knew that it was because when the club had first opened none of the new music had yet been recorded. The DJ played dub reggae because they were the only records he had. Misty didn't know what she was talking about.

Then Billy Blitzen was by his side, the sweat streaming down his dark Italian face. 'That A amp;R guy from Warners is coming down later,' Billy said. 'Warwick Hunt. For our second set. It's our big break.'

Terry placed a hand on Billy's shoulder. He felt for him. They all loved Billy Blitzen at the Western World, they were still in awe of him because of the Lost Boys, but somehow he was being left behind. While the musicians who had worshipped him from way back recorded their first or second albums in New York or Nassau, Billy was still playing basements for pin money.

'Man, I need you tonight,' Billy said. 'A review. Even just a mention…'

'I'm there,' Terry said, nodding emphatically. 'I'll do a review. No problem. You want to say hello to Dag?'

Billy stared at Dag and shook his head, grimacing with distaste. 'I already met that asshole,' he said. Then he was gone. The dub reggae thundered on. The bass line rang in Terry's head like an echo from the underworld. Misty was talking to Dag. He was listening patiently. Someone touched Terry's arm. 'You all right?' Ray said. Terry nodded blankly.

Look at her face, he thought. She looks - what is it? Happy. Fucking happy. He had felt closer to her than to anyone on the planet. Now he felt like he didn't know her at all. And he didn't know what to do.

Wild maniac drumming came from the stage. Terry tore his eyes away from his girlfriend and Dag Wood. Brainiac had occupied the empty drum kit and was attacking it with fury, his red, white and blue arms flying. At first nobody stopped him. There were no more fans. That was the idea. The old barriers between the act and the audience had been obliterated. No more heroes and everyone a hero. But when Brainiac began kicking the snare and throwing the cymbals around, the drummer of the P45s came back on stage and grabbed him by the throat. It was all right obliterating the barriers between the performers and the audience, but you didn't want some toothless idiot destroying your Sonor drum kit, did you? Terry gave Ray a push. 'Let's get some drinks.'

Grace Fury was standing at the foot of the stairs, smoking a cigarette and basking in the glow of her recent TV appearance, frowning over her guitar on Top of the Pops, plucking out the bass line to 'Baby, You Kill Me'. She had that glow about her, that glow they always got when success finally happened. She smiled at Terry and he liked it.

'Terry Warboys,' she said in that gently mocking way she had, touching the lapel of his Oxfam jacket. 'Still rocking and rolling?'

He laughed and didn't know what to say. He wondered if she was trying to catch Dag Wood's eye, even though everyone knew that her band's lead singer was her boyfriend. Grace ran her long fingers down Terry's Oxfam lapel as if she was stroking an erect penis, and he caught his breath. Everybody wanted her now. But not me, Terry thought. I already have a girlfriend. 'Got a little something for me, Terry?' Grace said.

'Catch you later,' he said, easing past her. He knew she wasn't talking about sex. She was talking about amphetamine sulphate. 'Not if I catch you first,' she laughed.

Terry wanted to get back to Misty as quickly as possible. But at the top of the stairs, someone stepped in front of him, barring his way. Terry pulled up and Ray clattered into him. It was Junior. The other two Dagenham Dogs, the fridge and the fat boy, were behind him, the cans of Red Stripe in their fists looking like offensive weapons. Terry's heart sank when he saw that Junior had

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a rolled-up copy of The Paper in his hand. He knew they were easily offended. Terry was aware that a gap in the crowd was opening up around them. He felt the dryness in his mouth. The old playground terror when faced with someone who can take you to bits. 'You work with that Leon Peck, don't you?' Junior said. Terry didn't have to ask what Leon had done. He already knew. He watched Junior lick his index finger and slowly open The Paper at the albums page. There was lots of space around them now, and everybody was watching, excited by the promise of violence. Some community, Terry thought. He knew what was coming. Leon had slagged off the first Sewer Rats album in flamboyantly bitchy true Paper fashion. He had criticised the band for their music, their politics and their choice of trousers. Even upside down, Terry could read the headline of Leon's review, REBELS WITHOUT A COCK.

'He doesn't write the headlines,' Ray said over Terry's shoulder. The refrigerator scowled, came in closer and Terry felt his testicles shrivel. But he took half a step to his right, placing himself between Ray and the fridge. 'We're not talking to you, hippy.' 'Leave him out of this,' Terry said.

'What about this bit?' said Junior. 'You would need a very small penis to make or listen to this exy-exer-execrable -'

'That means shitty,' said the fridge, not taking his eyes from Terry's face.

'- this execrable debut? Only that sad bunch of sub-Fonzie thugs who have blighted every Rats gig from the Red Cow to the Nashville. The likely lads who couldn't tell oligarchy from Ozzie Osbourne! Junior closed The Paper. 'Did he write that bit?'

Terry reluctantly nodded, conceding that Leon had probably written that bit.

'Well, you tell him,' Junior said, 'that we are going to break his fucking neck.' His gaunt face reddened, a vein in his temple began to throb. He began screwing up The Paper tighter and tighter, as if throttling it. 'And then we are going to break his fingers.' The Paper began to disintegrate, and so did Terry's bowels. 'And then we are going to shove his typewriter so far up his anus he'll be writing his next review with his electric toothbrush.' He threw the shredded magazine in Terry's face. 'Can you remember all that?' Terry nodded. 'Think so.' Junior pressed his sloping brow against Terry's forehead. 'Good.'

The three Dogs shoved them aside and headed downstairs. Terry watched scary-looking kids with metal pushed through their cheeks and steel-toe-capped boots on their feet flatten themselves against the wall to let the Dogs pass.

'They'll kill him,' Terry said simply. 'They'll really do it. They're not like everybody else down here. They mean it.' He suddenly felt more sad than scared. 'Let's get those beers.'

'I better get moving,' Ray said. 'I'd better start looking for Lennon. Can we get your tape recorder?'

Terry would be glad to get Ray out of here. Earlier he had entertained visions of Misty and Ray and Leon all happily hanging out with him and Dag Wood, talking about music, getting off their faces, sealing Terry and Dag's friendship. But Terry could already see it wasn't going to work out like that.

They stepped outside the club. It was raining harder than ever. Terry looked up at the monsoon sky. There was something wrong with this weather. The middle of August and thunder rumbled, lightning flashed and cracked directly above their heads. The sodden queue pressed itself against the tiled wall of the Western World. They didn't use umbrellas.

And then there was Leon, patrolling the pavement with a stack of fanzines under his arm, chanting like some old geezer selling the Evening Standard, water streaming from the brim of his trilby.

'Nazis are back. Fight the Fascists with Red Mist. Only ten pence, five pence for the registered unemployed. Nazis are back. Fight the Fascists with Red Mist. Only -'

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Terry took his arm and quickly pulled him round the corner, away from the flickering neon to where there were no lights, just the rubble and ruins stretching off into the darkness.

'They're waiting for you in there,' Terry said. 'They're going to get you.'

'Because of your review,' Ray said. 'The REBELS WITHOUT A COCK one.' Leon hefted the fanzines under his arm, tugged on the brim of his hat, thinking about it. And then he smiled like a naughty child. 'The Sewer Rats are waiting for me?' he asked. 'Those middle-class tossers? That bunch of bloody students? What are they going to do? Debate me to death?'

Terry shook his head. 'Not the band. The nutters that follow them. The Dagenham Dogs.' He watched the colour drain from Leon's face and he felt for his friend. Terry knew it was so much easier to be brave on the page than in real life. 'The ones you said haven't got any balls,' Terry reminded him. Leon bristled at that. 'That's a complete misreading of my review,' he insisted. 'I didn't say they have no balls. I said they have small cocks!

He wasn't smiling now. He hugged his fanzines close to his chest, peering around the corner. 'They're waiting in there, are they?'And then he saw something that changed everything. 'Bloody hell! Leg it!' The spike-haired gang outside the Western World had started to scatter in every direction. Fanned out across the ravaged street, a group of grown men were sauntering towards the club, and even in the gloom of Covent Garden, you couldn't mistake their silhouettes for anything other than their tribe. Long drape coats, thick brothel creeper shoes, skinny strides and greasy hair swept back in what was more of a Hokusai wave than a quiff. 'Teds!' someone screamed.

Terry was aware of Ray taking off and running, surprisingly fast, he thought, and he was just about to do the same when he

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realised that Leon was on his hands and knees, pulling copies of his fanzine from a puddle.

'Leave them, Leon!' Terry said, a disbelieving laugh rising from somewhere in the back of his throat. 'You mad bastard!

'It's the new issue!' Leon said, and Terry cursed and stooped and snatched up handfuls of Red Mist. He looked up and saw that the Teds had broken into a trot. And then he saw the thing that he had been dreading.

In the middle of them all there was a freakishly large man, a sumo wrestler of a Ted, a heavyweight in a drape coat that seemed to strain at the seams, huffing and puffing a bit, and sweating a lot, but with the kind of dopey, murderous look on his face that reminded Terry of the shark in Jaws. Terry knew that he was called Titch. 'Leon - I mean it - come on.'

And then they were off, breathless and gasping with fear and flight, Terry with a fistful of his friend's leather jacket in his hand, dragging him on, making Leon keep up. Fanzines scattering all around them, and Leon was still babbling about the new issue, and Terry's blood was pumping and he felt the wild, mad laughter well up inside him. Titch! Fucking hell!

Terry had once seen five cops trying to arrest Titch for throwing some Johnny Rotten lookalike through a Dunn amp; Co. window down on the King's Road, and the only way they could do it was by beating him unconscious. Terry could still see their truncheons bouncing off that enormous greasy head. If you saw Titch coming, then you ran. He looked as though he could snap you in half if he could ever catch you. Titch and the Teds were on their tails now - they had spotted them. Terry and Leon were running across rough ground, no sign of Ray, the darkness all around, the lights of the West End shining in the distance, Leon swearing and Terry almost choking with panic-stricken laughter, both of them running for their lives.

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The Teds were their great tormentors. And it wasn't like the Dogs - this was nothing personal and it made it all the more insane. They didn't need an excuse to batter you.

The Teds seemed like old men. Not just the ones who had been there in the Fifties, tearing up seats to Rock Around the Clock. Even the younger ones, the second- and third-generation Teds, seemed prematurely middle-aged. They had sentimental tattoos on their arms and elaborate sideburns on their chops and blunt instruments inside their drapes. So the kids from the Western World fled, like a herd of terrified antelopes dispersing before a pride of lions, and Terry laughed like a lunatic because he knew it was all a game, a lark, and nothing personal, but he ran because he knew the game could put you in hospital.

They tore across rough ground, tripping and stumbling through the blackness, over the rubble, and Terry could feel his heart pounding as if it would burst, could taste the salt of his sweat on his lips, feel his breathing start to burn. He could hear screams in the distance, and it made him stop laughing and concentrate on running and then suddenly there was another scream right by his side as Leon went down a water-filled hole and clattered flat on his face.

Panting hard and muttering a quick prayer, Terry pulled Leon to his feet. The hat was gone. Even in nothing but pale moonlight, Leon's hair gleamed metallic orange.

'Fucking hell, Leon,' Terry chuckled. 'What happened to your hair? What is it - ginger?' 'Autumn Gold.' Leon shoved muddy copies of Red Mist into his shoulder bag. He was in a grumpy mood. 'Where's my hat?' Terry scanned the ground and shoved Leon's trilby back on his head. He shushed Leon, and they half-crouched, watching the shadows of Teddy Boys hunting across the wasteland, passing nearby but spreading out, losing the scent. Terry gulped hard, put an arm around Leon's shoulders, pulled him close. The Teds looked like throwbacks, missing links, their feet enormous in brothel

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creepers, their torsos abnormally long in their Edwardian drapes, their shortened legs unnaturally skinny. And topping it all, that crowning glory of Elvis '56 hair, wilting now in the unseasonable weather. 'Come on,' Terry whispered.

They ducked inside a building with two of its walls gone. Terry guessed that it was once some sort of storehouse. Maybe they kept flowers here, back when it was a market. Now it looked like a bomb had hit it.

'Titch is not with them, is he?' Leon babbled. He was shaking. 'I didn't see Titch. I don't think Titch is with them.',.

'Titch is with them,' Terry said. He straightened Leon's hat, patted him twice on the shoulder, trying to calm him down. 'How could you miss the great ape? Come on.'

The ground floor was nothing but rubble, crushed bricks and splintered wood. They climbed a broken staircase to the first floor, and Terry was shocked to find the sky was still above them, the roof half gone, the rafters like a mouth full of broken black teeth.

'Everybody always wants to kick our heads in,' Leon whispered, and there was something about his plaintive voice that made Terry smile.

'Everybody always wants to kick your head in,' he hissed. 'Especially me. Next time, leave your rotten fanzine -'

Suddenly they froze. Something was stirring in the darkness. They were not alone. They pressed themselves against the angle of gaping walls. A stone skittered across the bare floorboards. Terry and Leon looked at each other, and Terry picked up a heavy piece of wood, thinking of Bruce Lee in Enter the Dragon, Bruce walking into the room full of mirrors, confronting his destiny. Then Ray stepped out of the darkness, his blond hair soaked and matted and plastered to his filthy face. 'This floor safe?' he said. 'Feels a bit wobbly.'

'Jesus Christ, Ray,' Terry sighed, dropping the piece of wood. They stared at each other and laughed nervously, woozy with

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relief. The Teds still hadn't caught them. They huddled under a piece of the remaining roof and slumped against a wall with bare bricks showing. Terry saw they were all exhausted. And it was still early. It was time to jump-start the night. 'Titch is with them,' Ray said. T saw Titch.' 'We saw him too,' Terry said, reaching inside his jacket pocket. He took out a small cellophane bag and, shielding it from the rain with his free hand, he held it out to Ray. But Ray shook his head, no, and gave Terry a disapproving look. Terry felt a flicker of annoyance. Ray would never let him forget getting messed up on his first day.

Leon was peering out of a shattered window frame. 'They're still down there,' he said. 'Those fucking dinosaurs.' Terry laughed. 'If anybody's going to be extinct tonight, it's you.'

He unwrapped the bag and dipped in the car key. When he pulled it out, the tip was covered in white powder. Terry placed an index finger on one side of his nose and the snowy key-tip under his open nostril. Then he sniffed hard, throwing back his head, tasting the chemical numbing the back of his throat. He blinked at Ray, his eyes filling up, and gave a satisfied cough.

'You keep taking that bathtub sulphate and you'll be extinct before anyone,' Ray said, and Terry knew that what he meant was -the first time I met you, you never wanted to see another drug for the rest of your life.

Terry did the same to his other nostril. 'It helps me work.' Makes me strong, he thought. Makes me fearless. 'Keeps me awake,' he said. 'Makes the music sound better.'

'The music shouldn't need anything to make it sound better,' Ray said. 'Or there's something wrong with the music'

'Oh please,' Terry said. 'As if the bloody Beatles weren't out of their Scouse boxes from one end of the Sixties to the other.'

'That's different,' Ray said, though he didn't quite know how it was different. He started pulling wet strands of hair from his face.

Terry smiled at him in the darkness. 'Getting an early night tonight, are you?' Ray shrugged. 'Probably not tonight.'

'You better give me some of that,' Leon said. 'I've got a long night myself. Got to sell the fanzine and then review Leni and the sodding Riefenstahls at the Red Cow.' He crouched before Terry and then hesitated. 'Not coke, is it?'

Terry laughed. 'Sixty quid a gram? I can't afford coke. And wouldn't want it if I could. I might turn into a Fleetwood Mac fan.' He dipped his key into the bag. 'This is the good stuff. Amphetamine sulphate from Fat Andy.'

Leon nodded approvingly. 'It's a proletarian drug. Soldiers took it in the war. To stay awake and fly bombers and fight Fascism.'

'Twelve quid a gram,' Terry said. 'It doesn't get much more proletarian than that.'

Leon noisily snorted the speed, a rhino at the watering hole. Terry and Ray both laughed and shook their heads, and told him to keep the noise down. 'What?' Leon said. Then Terry once more held out the tiny bag to Ray.

'Come on,' he said, his voice gentle now. 'It'll help you to stay awake. While you're looking for John Lennon.'

'You interviewing Lennon?' Leon said, sounding more impressed than he would have liked.

Ray nodded, seeming to say yes to everything. Terry watched him almost delicately sniff the speed, and he was once again aware that Ray had been doing this for longer than all of them. They smiled at each other in the darkness.

Terry crept to the empty window. Through the pouring rain he could see the neon sign of the Western World flickering in that ocean of blackness. He thought of Misty and wondered if she would wait for him to come back. And then he quickly stepped back when he saw the misshapen shadows moving around in the wasteland, still hunting their prey.

'We're here for a while,' he said. He stared up at the sky through the ruined rafters. 'I'll get you that tape recorder as soon as it's safe.'

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Ray was silent for a second. He could taste the speed on the back of his tongue, feel it lift his mood. Then he said, 'Okay, thanks,' as Leon excitedly pushed his face in their faces and said, Ts-it-having-any-effect-on-you-because-I-can't-feel-a-thing-and-I-wonder-if-it's-really-working?'

Ray and Terry laughed at him, and Terry shoved him, and Ray turned his hat back to front. 'What?' said Leon, genuinely baffled.

In the angles of the remaining walls, where the floor was driest, Terry kicked some splintered wood out of the way and lay down on his back. Ray stared at him for a moment and then lay down beside him. Leon lay down on the other side, moved around and got comfortable for a bit, and then he was calm at last.

Then they lay there in silence for a while, listening to the rain, watching it come straight down, feeling it cool their sweating faces. You couldn't avoid all of it, not with that missing roof, but after being chased by Teds, it was so refreshing that Terry sighed. And he thought how good it was to be still, to be quiet for once, to be with people you knew so well that there was no real need to talk, and to just feel the sweet kick of the sulphate in your veins, to enjoy that rush of pure euphoria, and to let it all go for a while.

Because, despite all the trials of their youth, summer was here, they were just starting out and when Terry Warboys looked up at the night sky, he couldn't tell where the stars ended, and where the lights of the city began.

SIX

The singing brought Terry out of his dreams.

A woman's voice, drifting across the wasteland, holding a note that could shatter crystal, and then another, and then another -these heavenly sounds that pierced his soul and seemed to know every corner of his heart.

What was it? Italian? A song of loss and yearning - Terry knew that much. A song about the love of your life turning to dust in your hands. There was something about the unknown song that made his heart flood with sorrow. As if he had already lost her.

'Puccini,' Leon said by Terry's side, startling him. '"One Fine Day". Very nice.'

Terry felt Leon get up on one side of him, and then Ray on the other. But he just lay there, staring up at the stormy dome above his head, the rain on his face, listening to the woman's voice, paralysed by the unearthly sound, finding the beauty of it almost unbearable.

It was the most glorious music that he had ever heard, and as it was punctuated by the thunder and lightning, it made him despair, made him feel numb with stupidity for giving himself so totally to a girl who would so casually let some old rock star rest his legs on her lap.

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Maybe it was crazy to have a girlfriend at all. To be courting, as his mum would call it. Maybe it was crazy to have someone special in this world, at this time, in this new life, when everyone was trying to be special. Maybe it was mad to have one woman when there were suddenly women all around, when every female in London under the age of twenty-five was flocking to the Western World with dreams of writing about music, or designing clothes, or taking photographs, or playing bass like Grace Fury. But the voice of the unknown singer gnawed at him, wouldn't let him be, and made him bitterly aware that Misty was the one he wanted, madness or not.

Yet what did he really know about her? He knew that she was nineteen, that she tasted of cigarettes and bubble gum, that her favourite photographer was Man Ray, that men looked at her in the street, and not just because she never wore a bra.

As 'One Fine Day' drifted across the black night, Terry knew with complete certainty that you didn't have to know someone to love them, and he also knew that he had never felt like this before, not with the girls in the Mecca and Locarno dance halls and the butcher's doorway of his old neighbourhood, or even the girl he had gone out with at the gin factory, Sally, the one he had liked so much, the one his parents had liked so much, the one they thought he might have ended up marrying, if he didn't have these dreams about another life as a writer waiting for him.

Unlike the girl at the factory, unlike Sally, Misty didn't want him to meet her parents, or talk about their feelings, or their future, and all that crap. She didn't want the things that he expected her to want. She wanted other stuff. He didn't really know what it was, though, and maybe she didn't either. The girls he had known talked about engagement rings and getting serious. Misty talked about The Female Eunuch and the suffocating tyranny of men. It drove him nuts. Maybe he should be like everyone else. Just screw around. Take his pleasures where he could. Not act like some old married man. Why not? You could sleep with everybody in the world if you wanted to. It wasn't as if sex had ever killed anyone.

But something in the Puccini drifting across the ruins made Terry realise that he wanted her, he wanted this one, and she was the only one he wanted. He got to his feet and joined his friends at the window.

'It's the aria from Madam Butterfly! Leon said. 'There's this Japanese chick and she falls in love with this American - I don't know - naval captain or something. Then he goes home and marries someone else. But she still loves him. And she says that one fine day her love will come again.'

Terry and Ray waited. Leon laid his folded arms on the window frame and rested his chin on his arms. He sighed. 'Then what happens?' Terry said. And then he comes back, but it's too late.' 'That's lovely, Leon,' Ray said, clawing wet hair from his face.

Terry angrily wiped his eyes. 'How do you know all this stuff?' he said.

'I just know it,' Leon said, embarrassed and glad it was dark. He couldn't say - my father loves opera, I grew up with this stuff on the music system. That was not the kind of thing you admitted to.

Terry didn't push it. He knew it was a sore point with Leon, this store of knowledge he carried with him. People came to the new music from all sorts of places - factory, dole queue, prison, private school, state school, and the army. Even the London School of Economics. Nobody asked too many questions. Reality was up for grabs, their lives were still waiting to take shape. Terry was glad that there was one of them who knew about Puccini.

The three of them squinted into the darkness. In the distance, walking towards the lights of the West End, they could make out figures in dinner jackets and evening gowns, returning from the opera, umbrellas up, the rain lighter now. It was one of the women who was singing. They listened until the party hailed a taxi and

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'One Fine Day' stopped and all you could hear was the rumble of the diesel engine. The yellow for hire sign went out and the cab pulled off into the night, a glossy black on a deeper black. They turned away from the window, and that's when Terry heard the voices beneath their feet.

'Are you sure that sulphate wasn't just talcum powder?' Leon was saying, unwrapping a thick pink slab of Bazooka Joe bubble gum and throwing it in his big gob. 'Because I can't feel -'

Terry clamped a hand over Leon's mouth. Ray had already heard them, and had sunk into a kind of protective crouch. Leon struggled, muttered a brief protest and then froze. Now he heard them too. Terry could feel the stickiness of the Bazooka Joe on his sweating palm.

'It's human nature,' someone said downstairs, and the voice -thoughtful, high-pitched, almost lisping - came up through the wrecked floorboards. 'It's because there's been no war for thirty year. All that aggression has to come out somehow.'

The three of them eased into the shadows, back into the angle of the two remaining walls, suddenly aware of every creak in the rotten floorboards. Thirty year. It reminded Terry of the way his uncles talked, the way his father talked. That old London habit of making everything singular.

'Don't know about that, Titch,' said a deeper voice and Terry felt his stomach curdle. Ray and Leon were both looking at him. Titch. Fucking hell! 'I just hate the fuckers and want to give them all a good hiding…'

'There's always been wars,' Titch was saying. Terry could hear them poking around, throwing aside pieces of abandoned furniture. Hunting their prey. 'The English and the French. The Germans and everybody. The Mods and the rockers. The skinheads and the Pakis. The Vikings.' 'Tony Curtis and Kirk Douglas,' said the deeper voice. Ray smiled. Terry shook his head. There was a splintering of wood. 'Fuck are you talking about?' said Titch.

'The Vikings', said the deeper voice. 'Good picture. Tony Curtis and Kirk Douglas.'

More smashing wood. There was a fury and violence in the squeaky voice now. 'Kirk fucking Douglas? Tony fucking Curtis?' More destruction. 'You think the Vikings were a bleeding film, do you?'

'I'm just saying.' There was something pitiful about the deep voice - a big man humbled. 'I'm just saying, Titch.'

There was a rustling sound at his feet and Terry saw a rat the size of his Auntie Elsie's cat poking its snout into Leon's newspaper bag. It made him shiver. Leon poked at the rat with his foot and Terry furiously seized the collar of his leather jacket and shook him.

'I don't like them either,' Titch was saying, conciliatory now. 'We've been around a lot longer than anyone. They look like they're not men. Just weird. Strange. Very odd. They nick our clobber - they'll wear a drape - but they'll rip it up. What's that all about? Or they copy bits of our music - it's rock and roll -but it's not done right. They say they're going to wipe Teds out. And we're not having it. It's out of order.' More wood being thrown, smashing to pieces, and the violence in the voice. 'It's a diabolical liberty.'

'They're taking the piss, all right,' said the deeper voice. 'Dog collars and dustbin liners and stupid coloured hair.' Terry and Ray both looked at Leon. 'We're not having it.'

The rat emerged from Leon's bag chewing a mouthful of Red Mist. It scuttled noisily into the darkness. 'Fuck's that?' squeaked Titch. You could almost hear them listening. 'Want me to look upstairs?' said the deeper voice. 'No, I'll go,' said Titch. 'You round up the others.'

They heard heavy footsteps coming up the stairs. Then Terry felt the grain of amphetamine sulphate lodged somewhere between

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his nose and his throat start to stir. He fought to control it but it was no good - a giant sneezing cough needed to explode from his mouth and he couldn't stop it. His mouth opened. His nostrils flared. The terrible snorting sound rose in Terry's throat - and Ray gripped his nose between his thumb and forefinger and the noise came out in a silent gasp. They stood there with Terry's hand on Leon's mouth, Ray's fist wrapped across Terry's nose, their hearts pounding, the footsteps getting louder. They pressed back into the shadows, up against the wall, until they could retreat no further.

A giant form appeared at the top of the stairs. Terry felt his breathing stop. A flash of lightning and Titch was suddenly illuminated, the massive face frowning with effort, scanning the room, the quiff standing up on his head like medieval plumage. Then he chuckled. The enormous rat was at his feet, sniffing a brothel creeper the size of a landing craft. Titch was still chuckling as he went back down the stairs. 'It was just a cute little mouse,' they heard him say. They didn't speak until they were sure the Teds were gone.

Downstairs now, staring into the blackness from the empty door, Terry listened to the voices drifting away towards the West End. 'We should get cracking,' he said.

'Yeah,' Leon said, stuffing wet copies of Red Mist into his shoulder bag. 'I've got to sell all these before I go and see Leni and the Riefenstahls.'

Terry smiled. 'You really think you're going to flog all these fanzines before Leni and the Riefenstahls come on? Who's going to buy theni?'

T'll have one,' Ray said, and Terry felt a stab of shame. It had never occurred to him to buy a copy of Leon's magazine. He watched Ray counting out the coins with hands that were still shaking.

Terry pulled out a handful of coins. 'Better give me one too,' he said. Leon laughed with delight as he gave them their fanzines and pocketed the cash. 'This is turning out to be a bloody good night!' he said, hefting his shoulder bag. 'Okay - I'll see you back at The Paper!

With their copies of Red Mist in their hands, Terry and Ray watched his slight figure making off towards the lights of the West End, moving across the flattened surface of Covent Garden like the first man on the moon. Terry looked at Ray. 'Want another line?' 'No, I'm cool'

Ray could already feel the euphoric buzz wearing off, and being replaced by a tight, jangled feeling. This was why he disliked speed. There was always a price to pay for the heady bliss of the first rush and your blood bubbling with pleasure. There was always a come-down. He wanted something to take the edge off the speed, but not more of the same. He said nothing as Terry dipped his key into the little bag, bobbed his head and came up sniffing like a man with a fever coming on. Terry didn't need saving any more. 'We should go,' Ray said. 'Get that tape recorder.'

'Yeah,' Terry said, although he was afraid to return to the Western World, uncertain what he might find. But the sulphate burned away the doubts, filled him with a kind of cocky elation, and made him feel like he could conquer the world. 'Misty will be waiting,' he said.

They walked back towards the club in silence, watching their footing for the potholes and muddy trenches that pockmarked the area. The rain was easing off, but it didn't make much difference. They couldn't get any wetter.

'Before you joined The Paper,' Ray said, 'when you were a reader, did you ever buy it a day early?'

Terry was distracted, trying to remember where Misty had parked the car. So much had happened - Dag Wood, the drugs, the Teds, getting chased, that bloody rat - that it felt like weeks ago. He could see the lights of the club in the distance.

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'You mean come up to the centre of town on a Wednesday?' he said. Now he thought about it, he could remember it well. 'I did it all the time. I did it every week. I got off my shift and caught the tube down to Tottenham Court Road. The stall outside the station. They always had it there.' He remembered the excitement he had felt every Wednesday, the new issue of The Paper damp with ink. Reading Skip Jones. Reading Ray Keeley. 'How about you?' 'Wednesday,' Ray said. 'It meant so much to me. My family hadn't been back in the country long. School wasn't going great. I didn't really have any mates. And The Paper - it was a window into this world that I loved, that I wanted to be a part of. That's why I went up there when I was fifteen with my little think piece on the Eagles.' Terry laughed. 'That's how it started,' Ray smiled. 'The Paper,' Terry said. 'It just made you see that there was something more than the drab misery of everyday life. All the greyness and disappointment. Know what I mean?' Ray nodded. He knew exactly what Terry meant. 'So I worked up the nerve to walk in there,' he said. 'Didn't know anything about making appointments. Spoke to White. He was great - asked me what music I liked, who I read - it really surprised him, how much I knew. Got a couple of albums to review - stuff nobody else wanted. That's how I got in there. Because it was the only thing I really cared about.' 'I still sort of feel the same way,' Terry said. 'It's different, but it still gets to me. When I walk into the office in the morning I always wonder what's going to happen today. Maybe I'll talk to Skip and he'll have found some great new band. Maybe there's going to be Debbie Harry or Joe Strummer sitting on my desk. And I know Leon will be arguing with people, and White will be laying out the cover, and the older guys will be shouting for the dummy, and all those kids out there will be waiting for the new issue - maybe even coming up to town to get it a day early' 'Like we did.'

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'Yeah. Like we did.' Terry stopped, scratching his head. 'Car's somewhere over there,' he said. 'I'm sure it is.' He looked at Ray. "What made you think of all that? Buying The Paper on a Wednesday?'

Ray took a breath, let it go. 'I might be leaving soon,' he said. 'I might be out.'

Terry was stunned. 'I can't believe it.' Somehow he had always assumed that the world would become how he wanted it to be, and then just stay that way for ever. He couldn't imagine the offices of The Paper without his friend. And suddenly he understood the importance of Ray finding John Lennon. 'White,' he said. 'That bastard.' 'It's not his fault,' Ray said. 'It's not Dr Barnardos.' They were at the car. Terry snapped open the boot.

'Wow,' Ray said, contemplating the Ford Capri. 'Misty's got a great car.'

'It belongs to her old man,' Terry said, embarrassed, for this was a time when you boasted about being on the dole or living in a tower block, not possessions or privilege. If you came from any kind of money, you kept quiet about it. 'He just lets her use it sometimes, that's all.'

'Nice wheels though,' Ray said. None of them had cars. They used the bus and tube, unless a record company or their expense account was paying for the ticket. Terry zipped open his kitbag and took out the tape recorder.

'If I can find him, I reckon he'll be easy to talk to,' Ray said. 'But I might puke up before I meet him. That's okay, isn't it?'

Terry nodded, slamming the boot shut. 'Yeah, I puked up before I met Bowie.'

Ray thought about it. 'It's just - you don't want them to think you're a dickhead, do you?'

'That's right.' Terry locked the boot. 'But of course your big problem, Ray, is that you are a dickhead.' 'Yeah, well. Takes one to know one.'

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They laughed and Terry shoved Ray, and then he was serious. 'They can't get rid of you.'

Ray shuffled his feet, hugging the tape recorder. 'I don't know why not,' he said. He tried to make his hair fall in his face but it was far too wet. 'Everything ends. It does. Sooner or later. This -all this - it has to end sometime. It's a music paper, not the civil service. Sooner or later, everything comes to an end.'

Terry looked at him and he thought that Ray wasn't just talking about his job.

'Yeah, maybe everything ends,' Terry said. He could hear the buzz of traffic, the distant boom of a live band, the city calling them to their fates. He gave Ray a final push, not smiling now -encouraging him, telling him to get moving, but mostly just for friendship's sake. 'But not yet.' Leon's senses felt heightened, alive, and awake to every detail on the top deck of the bus. He could smell cheap aftershave and beer breath and vomit and chips drenched in vinegar and, permeating all the other top-deck scents, the choking fog of cigarette smoke. He lit up a snout and sucked on it hungrily.

Beneath him he saw the pubs with their red, white and blue Silver Jubilee bunting, shabby and frayed now after a few months in the elements, and he wondered if they would ever take it down. He narrowed his eyes against the smoke and the light, and began composing his review.

He loathed Leni and the Riefenstahls with a passion - all that flirting with swastikas, all that art school pretension, all that po-faced bollocks done up as though it actually meant something. He knew he could write a great review. Which meant a great bad review, a hatchet job of distinction.

Christ, he thought, if you must have Teutonic end-of-all-we-know nihilism then listen to Kraftwerk, or the Velvet Underground before Nico had to flee New York. At least the mad cow was the real thing. Yeah, get Nico references into the review, he thought, bury the bastards with unfavourable comparisons. Attempting to recreate the Weimar Republic when you are from the Home Counties. Oh yes, he could use that too. Maybe he should be writing some of this stuff down. White would love it - would see that he was the rising star.

Leon wasn't ^looking forward to seeing the band - or being surrounded by all their pea-brain fans in their Mister Byrite jackboots - but he was really looking forward to slagging them off.

His plan was to write the review in his head on the bus, see the gig for a bit of local colour, then go back to The Paper in the early hours and knock out his review before they all started arriving in the morning. Then he saw something from the top deck of the bus and all his plans went out the window. Leon pressed his face against the glass, and although it steamed up with his breath, he could still make out the club shining through the mist and rain.

The Goldmine. The name picked out in sickly yellow neon that resembled Birds Eye custard far more than any precious metal. It was a Leicester Square disco that they were queuing around the block to get into, all these suburban kids in their High Street flares. Leon stared with wonder at the strangeness of their clothes.

The boys in trousers that held their crutch in a leech-like grip but then exploded around their ankles, shirts that were either plain short sleeves in this stretchy, clingy material, their young male nipples sticking through, or elaborate long sleeves with abundant collars - all of them open to the hairless chest with a St Christopher swinging around their neck, the patron saint of wankers in flared trousers, and the girls with those overdone mumsy haircuts, everything flicked up at the ends, every one of them a Charlie's Angel, and wearing lots of white to look good under the lights. A riot of wide trousers and hairspray and flicked feather cuts. Leon had to laugh.

Now that's truly a world without meaning, he thought. Nihilism? Blankness? A rejection of all values? Leni and the Riefenstahls

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should take a look at this scene. This is real world-negating numbness - not some rock-and-roll approximation.

But despite his reflex sneering, there was something about these boys and girls outside the Goldmine that touched him deeply, just as he always felt inexplicably moved when he was standing outside the Western World, trying to sell Red Mist. In the whole of battle-grey Britain, with its fading Silver Jubilee bunting in washed-out red, white and blue, it often felt like the only splash of true colour was the young.

Leon began dropping copies of his fanzine out of the bus window. They fluttered to the street among the disco kids like propaganda leaflets being parachuted into an occupied nation. Leon felt a warm glow inside as he imagined these culturally malnourished youngsters reading his thoughts on the Lewisham riot, the new Tom Robinson single and the MPLA. But then something terrible happened. The disco kids completely ignored the copies of Red Mist that were falling all around them. They chatted and laughed among themselves and fumbled in their tight clothes for the entrance fee to the Goldmine. They walked all over Red Mist.

Leon clattered down the stairs of the bus and jumped off into the traffic. Then he was among the disco kids, picking up the unwanted copies of his fanzine, cursing to himself about ungrateful bastards. He straightened up as he heard some sort of ruckus in the crowd. Voices raised in protest, muttered threats, a girl's scream. Violence was very close. And then he saw them.

More Dagenham Dogs were passing by, on their way to the Western World. Twenty of them, maybe more, a private army of shaved heads and pierced faces, all of it clumsily done - the shaving, the piercing - and caked with dark, dried blood. They roughly shouldered through the disco kids, heaving them out of the way when they didn't move fast enough, and asking anyone who protested if they wanted some. 'You want some? You want some?' Leon didn't want any. He knew if they saw him he'd be dead. He bolted into the lobby of the Goldmine, ignoring the protests of the girl at the door, ducking past a large black bouncer too slow to stop him, and down the wide, red-plush staircase. Leon stopped at the foot of the stairs, staring at the heaving dance floor as if he was an explorer who had stumbled upon some lost tribe. He had never seen anything like it. It was another kind of music in a different kind of basement. They were getting ready to leave without Terry. And then he comes back but it's too late.

Dag and his entire team of flunkies were piling into three cars lined up outside the Western World with their engines running. Misty was standing by an open door of the lead car while Dag, already reclining in the passenger seat, talked to her, the palms of his hands held upwards, as if he were praying, or selling something. She had the decency to look undecided. 'Misty?' Terry said, and she looked at him over the roof of the car.

Then one of the brothers in the band intercepted Terry - the beefy, meathead drummer with bad tats all over his back - and gently took his arm, steering Terry towards the end car. 'Don't worry, man, we saved you a slot.'

'I'm not worried,' Terry said, shrugging him off, and then Misty was in front of him. He shook his head. 'What's going on?'

'Dag's inviting us back to his hotel' Dag- as if she was the one with the relationship, not Terry. 'We're going to hang out.'