Stories we could tell

'It's all cool, man,' said the meathead drummer, suddenly there again, placing a large paw on Terry's arm. Terry pushed him off, not so gently this time. And he looked at Misty with eyes that said, or tried to say - this is me. That face he loved so much broke into a smile, but there was something behind it that he had never seen before. She was holding something back. He could tell. 'Why don't I see you there?' she said lightly. It wasn't a question.

Then before he knew what was happening Misty was climbing into the passenger seat of the lead car, easing herself on to Dag's

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lap. Terry heard laughter and a squeal before the door closed and the car pulled away. He stood there sick to his stomach with a feeling that threatened to eat him alive. The drummer had drifted away to the second car. And then some other woman's voice, calling his name. 'Terry?'

The back door of the last car was open. He saw a beautiful, smiling face, but couldn't place it for a moment. Oh yes - Christa. From Berlin. Dag's girlfriend or drug dealer or whatever. Black hair, white teeth, and skin that looked as though it had never been exposed to daylight. 'You can come with me if you like,' she said.

The second car, containing the drummer and his bass-playing brother and their pick-ups, had already left. And that was good because Terry felt a murderous rage towards the drummer, who had conspired with Dag to separate him from his girl. Like some kind of pimp, Terry thought, visions of Bruce Lee on the rampage in his head. Kicking, smashing, destroying. Fucking bastards, he thought. Fucking bastards, the lot of you.

But nobody had held a gun to Misty's face, had they? No, whatever got held to Misty's face tonight, Terry thought, it wouldn't be a gun.

So he got into the back seat of the final car. The woman -Christa - gave him the same easy, empty smile that she had given him in Berlin, as mechanical as a stewardess, a lovely smile that was strained from overuse, all its natural beauty drained away by faking it too many times.

Dag's manager, Warhol blond and fifty if he was a day, was in the passenger seat, next to a chauffeur with a peaked hat. Without turning round, the manager said something in German and Christa laughed. Terry didn't like any of it - the old boy who knew more than he did, the language that he didn't understand, the joke that he suspected was at his expense, and his girlfriend gone. That's what he liked least of all. Then Terry felt expert fingers exploring the top of his thigh. And the car began to move.

SEVEN

There were no good places to come down, but the underground was the worst.

The speed had left Ray with his nerve ends rattling, fighting off sweating claustrophobia and obsessively loading and unloading the cassette into Terry's tape recorder. This wasn't the time to be on the Piccadilly line.

Again and again, he made sure the red record light flicked on as it should, ensuring that it would capture Lennon's words when the time came. If it ever did. And he tried to batten down the mounting dread inside him, knowing it was only the other side of the drug. Speed always did this to him - showed him a great time and then threw him out the window.

When the three of them had been looking up at the lights and the drama of the storm, the amphetamine sulphate had felt like molten joy running in Ray's veins. But the euphoria wore off as time wore on, and now it had been replaced by a nagging, unname-able anxiety. He felt like crying. Everything seemed washed out and fucked up. Including him. Especially him.

The tube train thundered west, crammed with office workers with loud voices, all Take Six suits and Glitter Band hair, still stinking of the Rat amp; Trumpet, and the noise and the smell and

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nearness of all those other lives made Ray's head throb like a fresh bruise.

The office workers were rolling to their mainline railway stations and the last train home. Ray still had a job to do. Concentrate, concentrate. What's the plan, Ray? There was no plan. Licking lips as dry as the Gobi Desert, he suddenly knew he couldn't interview John Lennon feeling as bad as this. Interview him? He couldn't even find him.

He had got on the tube with the vague notion of staking out the lobby of the Hotel Blanc and waiting for John to show. The Hotel Blanc, tucked just behind Marble Arch, was the obvious choice - visiting American musicians almost always stayed at the Blanc when they were in London. A thousand cowboy boots had ambled past the palm trees in its lobby, a hundred bands had enjoyed its aura of slightly decadent affluence, dozens of music writers from the NME, Sounds, Melody Maker and The Paper had turned up with their notepads, dreaming of good quotes and free cocaine. By the time he was seventeen, Ray knew the lobby of the Blanc better than he knew the sixth-form college that he was still technically attending. Yes, he liked the idea of going to the Blanc. It calmed him down. It felt almost cosy.

But in his heart Ray already knew that going to the Blanc was hopeless. Just because Nils Lofgren and Fleetwood Mac and the Eagles stayed at the Blanc when they were in town, that didn't mean John Lennon would be there. In fact, it almost certainly meant that John would be somewhere else. John went his own way. I have to be like John, Ray thought. I have to go my own way. This is a lesson I must learn…

The tube train stuttered to a halt between stations, and the office workers jeered as an Asian voice came on the intercom to apologise for the delay. Stopping between stations when you were coming down - this was not good. This was the pits.

In response to the Asian voice, some of the office workers started singing some Peter Sellers hit - 'Oh, doctor, I'm in trouble.' - "Well, goodness gracious me' - while Ray fought to control his breathing, battling down feelings of panic. His left arm began to tingle and he felt his heart hammering like it would burst. A heart attack? Death was so close, it was always so close. They didn't realise that - Terry and Leon and the rest of them at The Paper. Everything you love will die and rot. All of it. Maybe very soon. Ray thought he might die tonight and that threatened to tip the panic over to hysteria. But he couldn't lose it. Not down here, stuck between stations. Not here.

He needed something to take the edge off the speed. He needed a different kind of drug. If he got off this train alive, the first thing he would do was score a nice mellow smoke. But he fumbled in his pockets and came out with only loose change and a Polo mint. Not enough to score. He fiddled with the tape recorder again, still enough speed in his veins to get caught up in the action, to1 become obsessed with it. That was the thing about speed, he thought. You lost yourself.

'Testing, testing,' he said as quietly as he could, pulling the tape recorder as close as a lover's face, and the office workers saw him and mocked and scoffed, saying things like, 'Do you read me?' and 'Come in, Houston,' and 'Beam me up, Scottie,' and 'Exterminate, exterminate.' Ray saw the little red light responding to his voice, and he tried to concentrate on that, aware that he was panting like an exhausted dog.

Then, as he watched the red light and tried to shut out the office workers, he suddenly knew what he wanted to do before he could talk to John.

He wanted to go home. He wanted to get straight. He wanted to soften the come-down with what he had hidden in his old Doctor Who lunchbox.

And most of all Ray wanted to see his brother, and to make sure that he was okay. It was easier to sneer on the outside. Down in the Goldmine, Leon was on their territory, and it made

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him pause, check himself, feel painfully aware that he was carrying a shoulder bag full of fanzines and wearing a funny hat. As he moved along the crowded bar he got a twinge of that old crippling self-consciousness that he'd had in front of mirrors when he was young, when you were just so burdened by how different you were to everyone else that you thought maybe you would never move again. He thought it was lucky that he was out of his mind on drugs. Everything in here was strange, new, different.

The dancing. The moves that Leon was used to seeing hardly qualified as dancing at all. Just this piston-like movement, up and down for ever, letting off steam. But here in the Goldmine they had these intricate steps and secret, hard-earned moves - they could really dance, the way Gene Kelly and Cyd Charisse could really dance. They made it look as though it was as natural as breathing. And Leon thought - why can't I move like that?

And the clothes. In the Western World they dressed as if they had salvaged some rags from the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust. In the Goldmine they dressed as if they were going to a wedding. In the Western World the clothes were shades of black. Here in the Goldmine their clothes were tight and white, their hair permed and teased, and everyone looked as though they had just had their weekly bath. And then there were the lights.

The Western World was always in almost complete darkness apart from the bare bulbs above the upstairs bar and the downstairs stage. The Goldmine was constandy alive with streams of piercing sci-fi lasers and twirling disco balls and pulsating strobes. Leon shyly bought a screwdriver and tossed it down, tasting the orange juice at the back of his throat, feeling the kick of the Smirnoff, fascinated by the intricate swirls of colour of the lights above the heaving dance floor, trying to work out when blue would change to red, positive he could work it out if only he watched carefully enough. There was so much colour in here. He had never known there could be so much colour. And then there was the music. No bands here. No lads in Lewis Leathers slouching on stage and saying something like, 'This one's about pensions. One! Two! Three! Four!' Here there were records and records only, with the DJ up in his booth, but nothing like the impassive natty dread at the Western World, there to provide mood music between the main events. Here the DJ bossed the night. And the music!

For some reason Leon had expected the Goldmine to be full of sappy romance and chart pap - but it was more narcissistic than that, more esoteric - all these exhortations to move it, get down on it, make it funky now. It wasn't like any mainstream music Leon had ever heard. It was harder, tougher, funkier - the DJ proudly boasted of white labels, imports, rare grooves. They were as elitist as any kid at the Western World.

This wasn't his kind of place. Not at all. What was the point of the fanzine in his bag? Why was he alive? He dreamed of fighting racism, defeating injustice, changing the world. And in the Goldmine they dreamed only of leaving the world behind. Yet he ordered a second screwdriver, and didn't want to go.

Because there was something about the scene - the lack of pretentious bastards on stage, the ever-changing colours of those epileptic Christmas lights, and above all the seamless, endless beat -the sheer mindless joy of the music, the way the records just flowed into each other, like a river of music - that he found hypnotic, and thrilling, and oddly comforting.

Leon began to sway at the bar, watching the dance floor, wishing he was brave enough to do that. Brave enough to get out there with the well-scrubbed kids in their tight white clothes. Brave enough to dance. And then he saw her. She was in the middle of the dance floor. The most beautiful girl in the world.

Surrounded by a group of her friends, all of them responding to some new record as if it was the news they had been waiting for. They whooped, they raised their arms above their heads, their

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dancing stepped up a gear. Someone blew a whistle and it made Leon jump.

At first the record they were responding to seemed like any other record in the Goldmine. This rolling, tumbling funk punctuated by a waterfall of piano and then a burst of lonely brass started wailing and then, finally, after an age, the voices came in.

'Shame!' cried the back-up singers, and then this woman with a perfect voice sang, 'Burning - keep my whole body yearning!' and then she muttered something that Leon couldn't quite catch, and then the chorus girls shouted, 'Shame!' again and then the singer was saying that her mama just didn't understand, and the chorus was moaning like love-sick angels - 'Back in your arms is where I want to be… want to be…' Leon had never heard anything quite like it. Never heard anything so full of life.

It made wanting someone, and not getting them, seem like the most important thing in the world. More important than… anything. The real reason we are alive. Leon's head was spinning.

He wanted to push through the crowds and talk to the most beautiful girl in the world and say - I get it, I understand, I feel the same way. But his tongue was a hopeless knot, his feet felt like they were in concrete. He knew he could never talk to a girl like that. And Leon dancing seemed about as likely as Leon levitating.

'Oh yeah, baby,' said the DJ, before this perfect record was even over, 'Evelyn "Champagne" King there with a little thing called "Shame"… and before we get down and dirty with Heatwave, we have some breaking news…'

Heads on the dance floor were turning towards the DJ in his booth. Leon kept looking at the most beautiful girl in the world.

'Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls,' the DJ said, uncertain of the tone he should adopt, and sounding both solemn and facetious. 'The King is dead.' No reaction on the dance floor. 'That's right - we just heard that Elvis Presley died tonight.' The DJ slapped down a record. 'Thought you would like to know,' said the DJ. 'That's the end Of this newsflash.'

They cheered. Leon stared at them in amazement. They were fucking cheering.

Not all of them. The most beautiful girl in the world and her friends looked puzzled, briefly conferred, as if they were not quite sure who this Elvis Presley person was, as if they had heard the name somewhere but couldn't quite place him.

But most of the dancers seemed to think that they owed the news some sort of reaction. And many of them whooped as if their side had scored, or as if one kind of music had just triumphed over another. And all of them started dancing again.

But by then Leon, emboldened by the speed and a sense of outrage that came naturally to him, was pushing his way across the dance floor and climbing into the DJ's booth, snatching up the microphone - the DJ took a step back, raising his hands in compliance, letting the madman in the funny hat have it - and then Leon was staring out across the dance floor, trying to find the words. He knew that this was important.

'No - wait - listen,' Leon said, and the DJ helpfully turned off 'Boogie Nights'. 'Testing, testing. Hello? Elvis - right? Respect to Elvis Presley. Elvis is - was - more than the ultimate rock star, right? Elvis is - was - where it all begins.' His voice was rising, it was coming to him now. 'Elvis broke down more barriers than anyone in history. Racial barriers, sexual barriers, musical barriers. I mean, the personal is political, right? Elvis - what Elvis Presley did - he dared to see the world in a new way…'

'Right on, baby,' said the DJ, leaning into the microphone. He smiled at Leon and nodded encouragement. 'Carry on.'

'Thank you,' said Leon. 'Black and white music - it was like apartheid before Elvis.' He was warming to his theme. 'Music was like one big fucking South Africa. White radio stations. Black radio stations. Music, all types of music, it was kept in a ghetto. Elvis made all of this possible.' Leon stared at them helplessly. They were

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all watching him. Maybe he had gone on too long. Maybe he could have expressed it better. 'I'm just saying,' he said, and there was a pleading in his voice now. 'Don't cheer his death. Please don't do that.' He tugged nervously at the brim of his hat. 'Forget about cheeseburgers and Las Vegas and, you know, white jump suits,? movies in Hawaii or dressed up as a soldier. Whatever. That's not it. You have to look at the way things were, and everything he changed. He was a great man. Flawed - yeah. Corny at times - well, all right. But Elvis Presley… he fucking set us free, man.'

There was a moment of complete stillness and silence. The crowd stared up at Leon, and Leon stared back at them, and nobody knew what to do. Then the DJ snatched his microphone back and Leon felt the air move as he slammed down a 45 like a short-order cook slapping a raw meat patty on a grill.

'Yeah, respect to the King, baby,' said the DJ, 'and respect to…' his voice dropped to a sultry baritone,'… the Commodores!'

Leon thought they would throw him out. There were bouncers at the Goldmine who were far meaner looking than any security at the places he was used to, these bouncers who looked like they treated violence as a profession, a calling, but he felt oddly calm about the prospect.

Leon wasn't a coward, not where physical violence was concerned. He could never be as afraid of bouncers or the Dagenham Dogs as he was of dancing. Or of talking to a girl he really liked, such as the most beautiful girl in the world. A quick, impersonal beating didn't scare him as much as the prospect of that incredible girl looking at him with pity.

But in the shadows of the Goldmine, the bouncers just stared right through him with hooded eyes and folded arms, not moving. One of them - a tough-looking forty-year-old with a silvery quiff-even nodded at Leon. An Elvis fan, he thought.

The DJ just smiled at Leon, patted him on the back as if he was some kind of floor show, and turned up the volume. The dancers were already lost in the music. Leon self-consciously started from the booth, feeling awkward.md clumsy and tight in the presence of all those habitual dancers, all those loose-limbed groovers getting down with the Commodores. He was depressed about the death of Elvis, and felt like his words were useless and inadequate.

Nobody knows what I'm talking about, he thought, and then he stumbled badly on the bottom step of the DJ booth and pitched forward like someone trying a reckless new dance move.

Leon was getting up off his knees and looking around for his hat when he was aware that someone was standing over him. It was the most beautiful girl in the world.

A journalist is at home everywhere, Leon thought, as she took his hand. At home everywhere. Remember that, Leon.

'Like the hair,' she said, the sound of the suburbs in her voice. Autumn Gold?' Terry loved speed because it helped him to think clearly.

The cold white conviction of the drug helped him to stay focused, to deal with the job at hand, to forget about all the things that didn't matter.

That's why on the short journey across the West End he was able to pretty much ignore Christa's hand resting on the top of his thigh, to shut out the mindless babble of Dag's manager in the front seat, and let the crowds beyond the car window just melt away. The speed helped him to give his complete attention to Misty, and what he was going to say to her when they got there. Oh yes.

The car pulled up in front of the Hotel Blanc, and Terry felt Christa's fingernails increasing their pressure. He looked at her as if for the first time and she smiled at him with her smooth, practised smile, and the funny thing was, he really liked her face, he had liked it from the moment he first saw her in Berlin.

He liked the red slash of her mouth, the pale skin, the unearthly, un-English whiteness of her teeth. The way she dressed more

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formally than what he was used to - like a businesswoman, he thought. All that was good. But he already had a girl, and he needed to find her.

Christa said his name but the door was open and he was already gone, out of the car and into the hotel, which he knew well from interviewing various longhairs from Los Angeles in his early days at The Paper, before he could pick and choose who he talked to, who he wrote about, but he still came here from time to time, most recently to interview a steady stream of shorthair musicians from New York. American groups at the Hotel Blanc was one of the things that never changed. The first thing he saw was Brainiac being ejected by a uniformed doorman.

'It is imperative that I speak to Mr Dag Wood immediately,' he was saying. 'Terry! Tell them!'

Terry was already at the staircase where Dag's rhythm section, the two brothers, were lazily ascending with a couple of girls from the Western World. The girls had seemed fashionably undomesti-cated in the gloaming of the club, all torn stockings and hair stiff and spiked with Vaseline, blinking out at the world from big black Chi-Chi and An-An circles. Under the harsh lights of the hotel lobby they looked like dumpy vampires, or overgrown children on Halloween. But Terry knew there was no man less choosy than a musician on the road.

The drummer brother, the dumber brother, all bulging tattooed biceps in his sleeveless vest, held out a meaty arm, hailing Terry like a long-lost friend. Terry wished he would stop doing that. It was really starting to get on his nerves. He walked past the drummer, and carried on up the stairs, two at a time, past the bass-playing brother, who he had actually liked, who he had spent time with in Berlin, who he had thought was some kind of friend. Terry was starting to learn that you could never really be friends with these people.

There was a door open at the top of the stairs, a party going on inside, and a waiter was trying to get a signature for a tray of drinks. He held out the pen to Terry as he approached and Terry scribbled on the chit, gave the waiter back his pen and entered the room without breaking his stride.

The room was full of people. Some of them he knew. The rest of Dag's band. Faces from the Western World. Other musicians who must have been lodging at the Blanc. Somebody that Terry had seen dealing little blue pills in the toilets at the Roundhouse. And then there was a familiar face at last. Billy Blitzen was sprawled on the sofa, short, dapper, hair everywhere, his immaculate waistcoat unbuttoned, smoking a joint the size of a Mr Whippy cornet.

T thought you had a gig tonight,' Terry said. 'I thought Warwick Hunt was coming down for your second set. I thought it-was your big break and I was going to do a review.'

Billy looked insulted. 'There's plenty of time. Who are you? My mother?'

'And I thought you didn't even like Dag Wood,' Terry said, scanning the room. No sign of her. Where the fuck was she? T thought you said he was an arsehole.' Terry's face twisted with a parody of transatlantic vowels. 'An asshole'.

Billy sucked on his Mr Whippy spliff, and didn't need to explain a thing. That's one thing I've learned about these New Yorkers, Terry thought. They follow the drugs. And then he saw Misty.

On the far side of the room, she came out of what had to be the bathroom followed by Dag Wood. Then she was leaning against a wall and Dag was standing in front of her, his hands resting on the wall either side of her head, almost pinning her there. Terry flew across the crowded room.

'Hey, man,' Dag said to Terry, slowly removing his hands, as if it was no big deal. 'What kept you?'

Terry stared at Dag, then at Misty. He realised he didn't know what to say. He didn't know what to do. He didn't know what was happening. All he knew was that he didn't like it, and his confidence was ebbing away with the kick of the sulphate.

'Is that my JD and coke over there?' said Dag, as smooth as a Foreign Office diplomat. 'Finally'

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A big cheesy smile and then he was gone, and Terry was alone with his girl again, alone with her in that rented room, and he waited for her to say something. 'What?' she said. All wide-eyed and innocent. Terry was speechless. 'What?' he said. 'What?' 'Yeah - what?' A bit of a fishwife tone creeping in now.

'Why'd you run off like that?' he said, more hurt than angry. 'What's going on? I mean - fucking hell, Misty!'

Misty examined her fingernails. T didn't run anywhere.' She sighed as if he was her bloody father. 'Chill out, will you? Please, Terry.'

'Chill out?' he said, suddenly agitated. 'Chill out? How can I chill out? What's wrong with you tonight?'

Her hands clawed at the air, grasping at nothing, trying to find the words. As if the way he was drove her insane. It scared him. This was even worse than he'd thought. 'Nothing,' she said. 'Everything.'

T want to know what's happening here.' Trying to keep calm now. Wanting to understand, to make it right. To get things back to where they had been only hours ago. Trying to avoid sounding like one of those men that Germaine Greer had warned her about. 'I just want to know…'

He struggled to express what he wanted to know. What had happened to the girl who had met him at the airport? And was it all over between them? And was she going to fuck Dag Wood? Yes, he wanted to know all of these things. But a part of him would prefer not to know.

And he wondered how he was meant to deal with the changes in his life. It was less than a year ago that he had lived in a world where you could get your head caved in for looking at someone's girlfriend the wrong way. For just looking. But now he was somewhere else, some weird place where you were meant to chill out and be cool and take it easy when someone was trying to actually fuck your girlfriend. 'You can't steal a woman,' Misty said, reading his mind, making him start with surprise. 'Don't you know that yet? Haven't you learned anything? You can't steal a woman. A woman is not a wallet. You know what your trouble is, Terry?' Now she was making him tired. 'Why don't you tell me?'

'All right then - you don't want a strong, independent woman. You want the girl next door.'

He almost took a step back. 'What's wrong with the girl next door?' Misty laughed in his face. 'She's a boring little cow.'

He thought of his ex-girlfriend, the girl from the gin factory. Sally. The one he had left behind with his old life. He missed her tonight. He knew Sally wouldn't be a sucker for Dag Wood. Sally liked Elton John. Especially Goodbye Yellow Brick Road. 'There's nothing wrong with the girl next door,' he said.

She shook her head, examined her nails. 'You don't want me to have a career,' she said. 'You can't handle it.'

It was his turn to laugh. 'This is a career? Some old rock star jumping on your bones? That's your idea of a career?'

She almost snarled at him. 'You don't think Dag might be interested in my work? Did that even cross your mind? That he might want to look at my portfolio?'

'Oh, I've got no doubt that he wants to take a look at your portfolio, love.' Then his voice softened. 'Come on, Misty. I saw him in Berlin. Dag fucks anything that hasn't got a knob. You think you're special?' She looked stunned. 'Well, don't you?'

He didn't know what to say. Of course he thought she was special. He thought there was no one like her in the world. But wasn't that obvious? And why have I never met your parents?' he said. It was all coming out now.

'Oh, what's that got to do with anything?' she said. 'You're just an old-fashioned guy, Terry. You want me to stay home and - I

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don't know - bake bread or knit socks or something. You want to hide me away from the world.'

He wanted her to understand. 'No, I don't - I just want to protect you. I just want to stop bad things happening.'

Misty tried to be reasonable. 'Look, Terry - he's a legend. We're just… talking, that's all. Really. We're just spending some time together. Like the pair of you did in Berlin. What's the difference? That I'm a woman? But why should that stop us? It might be 1955 in your head, but it's 1977 in here. We're just talking,' she said, and he felt horrible to see her so unhappy. 'And if not now - then when?' T know him,' Terry said simply. 'You don't.'

'But I want to,' she said, and they looked at each other with something close to loathing. A weight seemed to settle on Terry's shoulders. They had never looked at each other like that before. 'You'd like to chain me to a pushchair until my brain melts,' Misty said. 'Admit it!'

Pushchairs? Melting brains? He had no idea what she was going on about. He stood there dumbfounded, lost for words, offering no defence, as if guilty of crimes that he now realised he had committed by accident. Then suddenly Dag was back, his JD and coke in one hand, draping his free arm around Terry's shoulder.

'Look at that,' he chuckled, contemplating his glass and the thin frozen sliver floating on top of his drink. 'They call that ice. Say, man, you got any of that crank left?'

Terry stared warily at Dag. He still wasn't completely sure what was happening. He seemed to be the only one who felt that everything had gone wrong. Maybe he was overreacting. Maybe this was how things were in the new world, and you had to live with it. He wished he had more experience of these things. He wished he had seen more. He wished he were older. Maybe everything was innocent after all. How could Terry know? He felt like he knew nothing. Misty acted as though hanging out with Dag was a cross between harmless fun and a kind of job interview, fascinating but also vital for her career prospects, while Dag acted as if nothing unusual or untoward had happened - as if draping your leather-clad legs across another man's girlfriend and then whisking her off into the night and taking her into a fucking toilet in a hotel room and offering his own girlfriend as fair exchange - but was that really what had happened? - was socially acceptable.

Christa approached their little party and slid her arm around Dag's waist, smiling 'Hi' to Misty, who smiled 'Hi' back, and Dag's big lizard lips placed a wet kiss on Christa's ear. The tip of a fleshy tongue teased her lobe. Her smile never faltered. But, her hand in the car - that was surely a come on, wasn't it? Or was she just being friendly?

Terry gawped at them all, his face red, then fumbled for his speed, a fool who didn't know what to do with his hands. Perhaps he was making a big deal out of nothing. Be cool. That's it. He had to be cool. They would all have a line together and everything would be fine again, even better than Berlin because now Misty was with him.

But the cellophane bag of speed was almost empty. Just a few flakes were left, hardly enough for one decent line. They must have taken more than he realised when they were under the stars, hiding from the Teds. Terry held the bag up apologetically.

'That's okay,' Christa said, her accent more American than German. 'I've got some good stuff up in the suite.' Dag's huge blue eyes shone. 'Not the Keith blow?'

Christa nodded, and Dag kissed his fingers, a debauched-looking sommelier recommending the Chassagne-Montrachet, assuring Terry and Misty that they were in for an experience they would never forget.

The two young people laughed nervously, like children on Christmas Eve who had just been told that Santa was stuck halfway down the chimney. And they smiled at each other, as if something had been restored between them, healed and mended, and the

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atmosphere was so cool, meaning relaxed, that when Dag urged Terry to go with Christa and collect the good stuff, he could hardly refuse to go, could he? Because they were all friends here.

So Terry left Misty with Dag and found himself walking out of the party with Christa and catching the lift up to the very top of the hotel. She slipped the key in the lock, smiling her dazzling red and white smile. 'This is it,' she said.

It wasn't like any hotel room that Terry had ever seen. It was more like some rich man's house. He wandered through all that space in a daze, shaking his head - what would his mum think? There was a huge living room with a grand piano and a bedroom with a four-poster and a spiral iron staircase leading up to somewhere else. Net curtains shifted in the wind by the open windows, and Terry stepped out on to the balcony, catching his breath in the chilled summer night air, the rain falling gently now, and it felt like the best of the city was spread out below him.

He saw the lights of the West End, Marble Arch gleaming white and gold, the taillights and headlights of the traffic on Park Lane streaming past the big hotels and car showrooms all the way down to the Playboy Club where right now Bunnies would be dealing cards and spinning roulette wheels with their backs turned to the floor-to-ceiling windows one flight up, and from the street you would be able to see their fluffy rabbit tails shining. Terry smiled to himself, and let his eyes drift beyond all the noise and lights and promise to a great silent expanse of darkness that framed it all. Hyde Park. He breathed in, and it was like inhaling the air on a mountaintop.

When he turned away from the window Christa was sitting on the sofa, naked below the waist apart from a pair of high heels, with her legs crossed. She must have removed her shoes, taken her businesswoman's trousers off, and then put her shoes back on. That's a lot of trouble to go to, Terry thought. She was opening a carefully folded paper packet that was the size of a book of stamps. He watched her use a razor blade to ease a small mound of white powder on to the large glass-topped coffee table.

'Just a quick one,' she said. 'You've got time for a quick one, haven't you?'

She expertly hoovered up one long mound of cocaine into her perfect nose, and then another. She held out a short silver straw to Terry.

'It doesn't have to be a quick one, liehling, she said soothingly. 'You can take as long as you want.'

He watched her get up from the sofa and walk towards him, felt her place the silver straw in his palm, felt her lips on his mouth, her fingers in his hair, was aware of kissing her back, his hands on her rear, still holding the straw. And he felt himself start to want her, and then start to really want her.

For a moment he thought - why not? Why not just take her now and then go back to the party? Who does it hurt? Then he abruptly pulled himself away, a drowning man fighting for his life, and he was on his way out of the room before he could think about it, her voice and his erection urging him to stay.

'No, I've got to go,' he said, unsure if he was talking to Christa or himself.

She said his name again once, but didn't try to stop him, not really, and then he was in the lift impatiently punching the button for the first floor, but when he got there it was all quiet, the party was over, or had moved on, and the door where he had signed for room service was closed with a Do Not Disturb sign outside. He had thought that was Dag's room - wasn't it? But the suite had to be Dag's - didn't it? He looked down the corridor, but all the doors were closed, and the signs all said that nobody wanted to be disturbed. The anger began to boil up inside him. Where is she? Where's my girl?

He banged on the room they had been in, calling Misty's name, ignoring the American voice inside that told him to go and fuck

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himself. Finally the drummer brother threw the door open, sighing and buck-naked and as intricately mapped with tattoos as a Japanese gangster, and he wearily told Terry to go home, man. 'She's not here, okay?'

Over his shoulder Terry could see one of the dumpy vampires from the Western World kneeling on the floor, as if waiting to pray. 'No, it's not okay,' Terry said. 'It's nowhere near okay.'

'Well, that's too fucking bad, sport,' said the drummer, slamming the door in his face.

Then Terry was moving down the corridor, calling Misty's name again and again, his path impeded by the ruins of room-service deliveries left out for collection. He began banging his fist on door after door, until the ridge from his wrist to his little finger began to pulsate with pain, and voices beyond the locked doors were raised in threats and protest. At the end of the corridor Terry saw his face in a long wall mirror and was stopped in his tracks. He looked like some monkey-faced kid, pale from the speed and wet-eyed from losing his girl. Not a proper grown-up. Nowhere near it. He didn't want to be this way. Everything was out of control.

So from the nearest trolley he picked up a champagne bucket and hurled it with full force at the mirror. It felt like the glass was still breaking when the two security guards came running up the stairs. Terry stood there hypnotised as the mirror fell away in long shards that shattered and splintered to sparkling pieces as they hit the floor with this tinkling sound that was almost musical. Then they had him. Then they were dragging him away. 'Misty!' he shouted, trying to dig in his heels. 'Misty!'

But there was no Misty, only people he didn't recognise peeping from beyond doors that never risked releasing the safety chain.

The hotel guards pulled Terry down the stairs and through the lobby, the late-night tourists staring at him as if he was a madman, and he felt the fight going out of him. And he heard the guards laughing at him.

Then he was through the big glass doors and out into the night, dumped on the seat of his pants on the pavement, the security guards turning away as he called her name one last time, shouting up at the hotel rising above him, searching the windows for his Misty. But he saw only darkness and a few fleeting shadows up there. They could have been anyone.

He slowly got up, knowing he wasn't Bruce Lee, knowing he was weak, knowing he had lost her at the first hurdle, knowing the girl he loved was being fucked by some other man. Somewhere far away, the church bells were chiming midnight.

On his feet now, the rain on his face, the loss of her pressed down on him like a physical weight. He had never felt like this before. He had never been brought so low by another human being. All that misery, jealousy and rage, all that dark stuff, all of it wrapped up in the shape of a nineteen-year-old girl.

He shouted her name one last time, knowing it was useless, and it came out like a cry of pain. The love song of Terry Warboys.

And as he stood there feeling all the places that he hurt, they came around the corner and the blood seemed to freeze in his veins. Teds.

An entire pack of those terrifying, unmistakable silhouettes -the sharks' fins of their greasy quiffs, the torsos abnormally long inside the drape coats, the skinny Max Wall legs and the feet enormous inside their rubber-soled brothel creepers. And at their head was the monstrous form of Titch, Frankenstein's Teddy Boy, his limbs so large that the act of walking seemed to require a superhuman effort.

It seemed to be an entire tribe of them - three generations, from pimply, pale-faced teens to the scary forty-year-olds with a quarter-century of manual labour behind them, all the way up to the granddads, the elders of the tribe, those pitiless old lions with

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missing teeth and thinning quiffs and silver shining through their Brylcreemed ducktails.

Terry stood there awaiting his fate, unable to leg it, with no heart to scrap, knowing that anything he did was pointless. Resigned to being battered senseless, and not caring much with Misty in some new bed. And then something remarkable happened.

The Teds walked by, they just walked on by, passing either side of Terry like a school of flesh-eating fish with no appetite. Titch himself passing close enough for Terry to smell his perfume of tobacco and brown ale and Brut splash-it-all-over cologne. But they didn't touch him. They didn't even look at him. They let him be.

And as the Teds passed, the only sounds that Terry could hear were the drum beat of his heart, the soft tread of their brothel creepers on the wet pavement, and the muffled chokes of their sobbing, as the warrior tribe mourned their dead king. PART TWO:

1977 - ANGELS ARE SO FEW

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EIGHT

Terry stood in the middle of Oxford Street with the Ford Anglia hurtling towards him.

Its lights were flashing and the driver was leaning on the horn. Terry took off his mohair jacket and brandished it like a bullfighter's cape, crying a bit. Hemingway, he thought. Death in the Afternoon. She'll miss me when I'm gone.

Terry could see the driver's face now, twisted with anger and fear, a girl by his side, a woman, long hair flicked up at the ends. The clean hippy look that you saw about ten million times a day. She had her hands to her face. She seemed to be screaming.

'Come on then,' Terry said, shaking his jacket as the Anglia came towards him. He felt himself stop breathing.

The car swerved to avoid him, scraped against the side of the pavement and hurtled past in a blur of metal and noise and green and cream paint. A wing mirror caught Terry's jacket and whipped it out of his hands. It fell off outside Ravel's, and as Terry went to retrieve it he could hear the driver shouting abuse. But the Ford Anglia didn't stop. They thought he was a nutter.

Terry left his jacket where it lay and stared at the shoes in the window of Ravel's. They all seemed to be some new colour that Terry had never heard of - this sort of bruised purple. Aubergine,

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they called it. Our aubergine range of Oxford heels now in stock. Terry shook his head. He felt like he didn't understand anything any more. He felt like there was lots and lots of stuff going on that he just didn't know about. He thought - what's going to happen to me? Who's going to love me? He punched the window as hard as he could. Then he punched it again.

It must have been some kind of reinforced glass, because the blow did far more damage to Terry's hand than he did to the window. He stood there like a lemon, inspecting his skinned and throbbing knuckles. Then he heard the bus.

A big red double-decker, a number 73, was barrelling down Oxford Street on the wrong side of the road. That's a bit off, Terry thought, collecting his mohair jacket and dusting it down. Then he brandished it in both fists, placed himself in the middle of Oxford Street and waited for his bus.

The bus didn't slow down, it didn't sound its horn and it showed no sign of altering its course. Either the driver hadn't seen Terry, or he just didn't care if Terry got hit by a bus. Terry's life was clearly nothing to the driver. He licked his lips. The bus was getting closer. And closer. Jesus, it was big. And closer still. And Terry didn't want to die.

Terry threw himself out of the way and landed on his belly and elbows with a grunt of pain as the bus careered by, swerving sick-eningly now, suddenly seeming top heavy as it bounced off the kerb on one side of the street and then the other with a screech of rubber and hubcap. Then it was up on two massive wheels, and then up on the other two massive wheels, holding that pose for what seemed the longest time before it keeled over, this great hulking red beast toppling over in slow motion, hitting the ground with a whoosh of air and cracked glass but still not stopping, still moving but on its side now, screeching down Oxford Street with a sound of metal on concrete that seemed to split the night.

Terry was on his knees, his breath coming in short, terrified gasps. What had he done? Oh God - don't let them be hurt. Please - I'll do anything. He slowly rose to his feet and took half a step towards the stricken double-decker. And then he saw them.

Junior was the first to appear, his terrible shaved head popping out of the driver's cab like it was a trap door, the tattoo of three teardrops looking like a black wound. Then another Dog appeared from the same opening - there must have been two of them at the wheel - and then Dogs were pouring out of the stricken bus like rats from a burning barn, crawling out of the long emergency window at the back, tumbling over the upended platform, kicking side windows out with their murderous boots. And as the police sirens wailed in the distance, they ran and hobbled down Wardour Street and Dean Street and Poland Street into the dark sanctuary of Soho.

Terry sprinted east, away from police and Dagenham Dogs, and he didn't stop running until he reached the British Museum, where, covered in sweat and lungs bursting, he held on to the railings with the giant white columns lit by moonlight like a vision of some lost civilisation.

And as Terry stood there steeped in the mystery of the ages, he asked himself, as he would ask himself so many times in the years ahead - how the fucking hell do you steal a bus? The train rattled north, heading for home, and Ray could feel the spirit being sucked out of him. Home always did that to him. He pressed his face against the window as they passed the twin towers of Wembley, lit by moonlight. Nearly home.

Ray always thought that home was like some dream of England that his father had on a bad day in Hong Kong. One of those bad days when you opened the wardrobe and found that the humidity had grown mildew on your clean shirt, or the crowds in Kowloon made the place seem like one great big screaming nuthouse, or there was some old man in a vest and flip flops gobbing on the pavement and scratching his crutch. Ray and his brothers had loved Hong Kong. Loved every second,

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and wept when the ship left for home. There was endless adventure for three small blue-eyed boys among the secret islands, the unexplored hillsides, the swarming backstreets where you could stuff your face at a dai pai dong street stall. And their mother, who had seen nothing beyond the Home Counties, had loved the markets, the temples, the exotic glamour on every street, the lights of Central seen from the Peak, the excitement of every plane coming through the skyscrapers to land at Kai??? Airport, the reassuring sight of the Star Ferry, and the unadorned friendliness of the Cantonese.

But not Ray's father. His father hated the crime, the stink, the great press of humanity. All the foreign faces and their resentment of a pale Englishman in a policeman's uniform. His father dreamed of England, his father dreamed of home. White faces and green gardens, clean cars and neat children, never too hot and never too cold. A tepid sort of home. And that's what he brought them back to.

Home was always there. All through the night, the trains carried milk and papers and the last of the drunken commuters out to the endless suburbs. You could always get back, no matter how late it was and no matter how pissed you were, you could always get home even if it was only on a train that stopped at every half-baked hamlet on the line.

Ray knew that they had once called this place Metroland - a salesman's term, a marketing brand name from the first half of the century when the areas north-west of London in Middlesex, Hertfordshire and Buckinghamshire had first been sold to the public as some kind of suburban dream. Ray's father had bought the dream. The rest of them had to live in it.

The train pulled into a gloomy station surrounded by scrubby fields and an almost empty car park and an estate of box-shaped houses. Ray was the only passenger to get off.

He walked through streets of pebble-dashed semis where everyone was tucked up and dreaming, and paused at the gateway of a house that looked just like all the rest. No lights were on. Good. He wouldn't have to see his father.

But before he had let himself inside he was aware of a man's voice coming from the living room. The television? No, it was past midnight, the telly had finished hours ago.

'The resolution of the British people is unconquerable,' rumbled the voice. 'Neither sudden nor violent shocks, nor long, cold, provoking, tiring strains can or will alter our course'

It was an album. One of his father's records. Winston Churchill. His dad's favourite recording artist.

Ray trod lightly down the hallway. The living-room door was slightly ajar. He peeked through the crack and took in the familiar scene in a moment. He saw his father comatose in his favourite chair, the one that faced the TV, an empty glass at his slippered feet. The smell of tobacco and home brew. The LP still turning on the Dansette.

'No country made more strenuous efforts to avoid being drawn into this war,' Churchill said. 'But I dare say we shall be found ready and anxious to prosecute it when some of those who provoked it are talking vehemently of peace. It has been rather like that in old times. I am often asked to say - how are we going to win this war?'

Ray's father had always listened to this stuff. Even when they were in their flat in Hong Kong, before they lost John and it all went so wrong, Ray could remember having to play quietly at the weekends because his father was listening to Churchill's speeches, eyes glistening with emotion. But since John's death, it had got worse. Now the old man was mixing home brew with the speeches. Ray headed down the hall, the God-like voice rolling through the house, wondering how his family could ever be happy again.

'I remember being asked that last time,' said Churchill, 'very frequently, and not being able to give a very precise or conclusive answer.'

Ray went up the narrow staircase, his footsteps creaking on the worn Cyril Lord carpet, and he crept past his parents' bedroom,

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hearing the sound of his mother's breathing, and her muttering in her sleep, despite the pills the doctor was dishing out like Smarties, and then past John's old room, untouched since the day he died, and finally to the room at the end of the hall that Ray shared with Robbie. He eased himself inside, silently closing the door behind him, and was immediately frightened by the stillness of his brother's body. Ray knelt by the bed, the palm of his hand in front of Robbie's mouth, smiling to himself when he felt warm breath on his skin. Then suddenly Robbie was sitting up in bed, gasping with shock. 'Shut up, dummy,' Ray hissed. 'It's only me.' Robbie rubbed his eyes. 'I thought you was a ghost. Dummy] 'Ghosts don't exist. I told you. And don't call me dummy. Go back to sleep.'

But Robbie was awake now. 'Dummy, dummy, dummy,' he hissed, keeping his voice low. Then he yawned. 'Why did you wake me up?' T was just checking on you.'

Ray went over to his side of the room, for Ray and Robbie's bedroom was as segregated as East and West Berlin. Ray's walls were tastefully decorated with a few select images of the Beatles -a Yellow Submarine poster, a Magical Mystery Tour flyer and the four big glossy pictures that were given away inside the gatefold sleeve of Let It Be, the boys looking beardy and wise. Even Ringo. The posters were fraying around the edges now because Ray was really too old for all that kid stuff. The real John Lennon was waiting for him. Somewhere.

Robbie's walls were plastered with any rubbish he could get his grubby hands on, mostly posters given away with the one-shot magazines he somehow persuaded their mother to buy. Bands he probably hadn't even heard. But mostly pictures of the Jam. Robbie came across the room and squatted by his brother as he flipped through his record collection, looking for his Doctor Who lunchbox. 'You haven't touched these records, have you?' Ray said. 'No way, Jose.' 'Can you stop saying that? Nobody says No way, Jose any more.'

'What did you do tonight?' Robbie said. Ray could smell his brother's clean breath. Colgate Dental Fresh. 'Did you meet Paul Weller yet?'

'I told you. They're not going to send me to interview Paul Weller. They'll get Terry to do that.' He kept flicking through the records. 'I was at the office. Then I was in a club with my friends.' Ray looked at his little brother. 'And now I'm here with you.'

'It's all right for some,' Robbie said. Sometimes he talked like an old woman. And he was only a kid. Their mum still washed his face with a flannel. 'What did you do tonight, Rob?'

Robbie shrugged. 'Watched telly. Did my homework. Counted my pubic hairs.' 'Yeah? How's that going?'

'Thirteen. One fell out. I think I must be moulting.' Then he almost squealed with excitement. 'If you meet Paul Weller -' 'I won't, okay?'

'But if you do meet him, get him to sign something for me, will you?'

Ray smiled at his brother in the darkness, and patted him on the shoulder of his pyjamas. 'Maybe I'll get Terry to do it. How's that?'

Robbie rocked with delight, hugging his knees. 'Wait till Kevin Wallace sees my brother knows Paul Weller!'

Ray pulled out a fistful of albums topped with Exile on Main Street, reached through the gap in the record collection until he felt the leatherette of his old abandoned school satchel. He fished out a scratched Doctor Who lunchbox, flipped it open and pulled out a short, stubby, slightly squashed hand-rolled cigarette. His emergency joint. Robbie's eyes were wide. 'I know what that is,' he said. 'That's drugs, that is.'

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'You're a genius, aren't you?' 'Dad will kill you.' 'Then I'll be dead.' Then they were both silent, thinking about the room down the hall that no one was allowed to touch, that no one was allowed to enter, and the brother who you were not allowed to mention in this house. The brother you couldn't even fucking mention. Ray thought of those unseen, untouchable walls, dedicated to the glory of Led Zeppelin and Muhammad Ali and Charlie George, and his brother's strength and kindness, and that country road near the border in Northern Ireland. Ray heard Robbie starting to snivel, and put his arm around his shoulder. 'It's okay, Rob.' 'I miss him, that's all.' 'We all miss lohn. Come on.'

Ray went over to their window and gently pulled it open. Cool air rushed in, the smell of newly cut grass after rain, that summer softness. He could hear Robbie by his shoulder, sucking up snot, drying his eyes. His little brother, being brave. Ray stuck his head out of the window and lit up, took a long drag and held it. His brother giggled as Ray exhaled. 'Dad will marmalise you,' Robbie said. But Ray already felt better. Seeing his brother, holding the joint. He let the jangled nerve endings relax, felt his breathing slow down, and the anxiety seep away. Finding John Lennon -how hard could it be? He had hours to go before dawn. He took another hit, narrowing his eyes at all the patches of garden below with their sheds, their flowerbeds, and the occasional bomb shelter.

'Let me have a go then,' whispered Robbie. 'Go on. Don't be a spoilsport. I won't tell anyone.' Ray shook his head. 'No way, Jose.'

'Go on then,' Robbie said, lunging for the joint. 'Let me have a go. I'm only here for the beer.' Robbie had this annoying habit of quoting commercials. Ray held the joint away from him. 'You're too young.' 'I'm almost thirteen!' Ray laughed. 'Exactly.'

'It's okay,' Robbie said. He fanned the air towards his face. 'Because I can get high just standing next to you.' He closed his eyes. 'I can feel it… I'm stoned… I'm freaking out…'

Ray felt the smouldering roach in his mouth, stubbed out what was left on the window sill and flicked the charred remains into the garden of Auntie Gert and Uncle Bert next door, who were no relation whatsoever. Then he put his Doctor Wholunchbox inside his satchel, shoved it under his bed and headed for the door. 'You're not going out again, are you?' Robbie said. 'I'm going to interview John Lennon.'

Robbie was impressed. 'The bloke that was in the Beatles? Paul Weller likes the Beatles. But they were not as good as the Who -any dummy knows that.' 'Go back to sleep, okay?' Ray said. 'I'll be back tonight.' 'Promise?' 'Yeah.' 'Okay.'

Ray waited until his brother had got back down under the sheets, and then let himself out of the bedroom. His mother was standing on the landing, her hair in curlers, clutching a pink polyester dressing gown at the neck. 'Thought it was a burglar,' she whispered.

We have spent a lifetime keeping our voices down, thought Ray. Because of him. Because of the old man.

'It's only me, Mum. Sorry I disturbed you.' She was always anticipating disaster. He kissed her on the forehead, her skin as parched and white as old paper, although she wasn't even fifty yet, and he saw that she was trembling. My nerves, she always said, as if that explained everything. Her nerves had been fine until John died and the quack started filling her up with pills and Dad got into the home brew.

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'You're not going back out again, are you?' she said, as if he was planning to climb Everest rather than catch a train back to the city. 'Do you know what time it is?'

She peered at her gold Timex, but couldn't read the face without her reading glasses. She held the watch at arm's length, squinting, but it was still no good. 'It's flipping late,' she said.

'Got to go to work, Mum.' He hugged her, felt the frail body. All skin and bone, she would have called it. 'Please go back to bed. Don't worry about me. I'm fine. I'm always fine.'

He started down the stairs while his mother fretted to herself about the lateness of the hour, and the danger of the world. In the living room Churchill growled on. Ray reached the bottom of the stairs and then the door of the front room flew open and his father was standing there. 'We did our duty,1 said Churchill.

'Where the bloody hell are you going?' said the old man. Fuming at nothing. As always. 'You treat this place -'

'Like a bloody hotel,' Ray muttered. A mistake he immediately regretted.

His father's face reddened. 'Your lip now, is it? Do you think you're too big and too ugly for a good hiding?' His mother had a kind of strait-laced decency, a sense of propriety. But his father had never seemed far from violence, even before his eldest son had been lost. Beyond the net curtains of their little semi, his father still carried the bite and bile of the South London slum where he had grown up. The old man frightened Ray. Especially when he could smell the home brew on him. 'I'm going to work,' Ray said. 'I'm going to interview John Lennon.' His mother's voice called from the top of the stairs. 'There's no more Northern Line. I told him. It's the mainline or nothing.' The old man shot her a withering look. His contempt, mat was what you noticed most about him, Ray thought. He acted as if he despised the people who shared his life. Then he looked back at Ray. 'John Lennon? That weirdo? That bender?' Pushing Ray now, shirting to enjoy himself a bit. 'The long-haired beatnik with the mad Chinese bird?'

Ray tried to get past him, but the old man blocked his path. Kay felt weak in his father's presence. He didn't want to fight. But his father always wanted to fight.

'Now we have to do it all over again,' Churchill said. "We have to face once more a long struggle, the cruel sacrifices, and not he daunted or deterred by feelings of vexation! 'That drug addict?' said the old man.

Ray flared up. 'Don't worry, Dad. You can't teach John Lennon anything about getting out of his head.'

Then the old man had Ray by the lapels of his denim jacket and was swinging him around, banging him hard against the wall, clipping the table that was home to the telephone and some cherished souvenirs, rattling the ornaments that Auntie Gert and Uncle Bert had brought back from Benidorm, the plastic bull and the set of maracas, before he held his son close to his face, screaming at him. 'And what does that mean? What does that mean?'.

'Nothing!' Ray shouted, as his mother sat down halfway down the stairs, moaning that her nerves couldn't take any more, and Robbie sat beside her and started to grizzle, burying his face in his mother's pink dressing gown. 'Tell me what it means!' Ray's father bawled.

'It means you getting stoned every night on your crappy homemade beer,' Ray shouted back, and felt the palm of his father's hand crack across the side of his mouth, his bottom lip splitting on his two front teeth, and then everyone was crying, apart from the old man, who released Ray with a snort of scorn.

'I'm not fighting you, Dad,' Ray said, shrinking into himself, leaning against the wall. There was a fleck of blood on the floral wallpaper.

'Of course you're fucking not,' said the old man, and he went back to the living room, settling himself in his favourite chair and pouring himself a glass. The record was still playing.

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'I have never given you any assurances of an easy, or cheap, or speedy victory,' warned Churchill. 'On the contrary, as you know, I have never promised anything but the hardest conditions, great disappointment and many mistakes. But I am sure that in the end all will he well for us in our island home. All will he better for the world.'

And Robbie was whimpering at the top of the stairs, having retreated when the old man got physical, while his mother had Ray's face in her small, bony hands, pulling it this way and that, making the stinging red flesh hurt even worse, and Ray told her through his tears that everything was fine.

'You're weak,' said his father. It was the worst thing he could think to say. 'You're all gutless.'

'And there will be that crown of honour for those that have endured and never failed which history will allow them for having set an example to the whole human race] said Churchill.

Ray pulled himself away from his mother's embrace, and stumbled to the door. His mother's kindness and concern humiliated him as much as his father's violence. The record was spinning on an empty groove. It was over.

'It should have been you,' Ray's father said, not stirring from his favourite chair, not even looking at him, just staring into the empty fireplace that they no longer used because of the central heating while the end of the record crackled and hissed. 'He was worth ten of you. With your long hair and your drugs. Oh, you think I don't know about that? I know all about it, my lad. It should have been you!

He hadn't said it before. But it didn't hurt Ray as much as he thought it would. Because he knew that his father had always thought it. 'I'm going now,' Ray said, to nobody in particular. He opened the door, his mother on the stairs fiddling with the neck of her pink dressing gown, his little brother peering through the banisters like a pale-faced prisoner. And as he walked back to the railway station through those? omatose streets, his mouth pulsed with the smack his father had given him, his bottom lip was torn and swollen thanks to the old man, and Ray wondered if his dad would have been a better man 11 his life had been easier, if the dreams had all worked out. Thinking about his father made Ray think of John Winston Lennon, born on 9th October 1940 during one of the Luftwaffe's night raids on Liverpool, and the feckless ship's waiter, Freddy Lennon, who so soon abandoned baby John and his mother. Yes, thinking about his old man got Ray thinking about his hero, and how John grew up without the presence of a father in his life. And Ray thought -oh, you lucky, lucky bastard.

His face hurt and he knew from experience that it would hurt for a long time. Getting smacked wasn't like the movies. In real life it was amazing how much mess your father could make of your face with just one punch.

Then his stomach seemed to rise up to his mouth and Ray had to hold on to a lamppost until he choked it down. Here was this other thing that violence did. Violence made you sick. Violence made you feel like puking, as though just being on the wrong end of it gave you some kind of illness. Ray knew all about it.. His dad had taught him.

Nobody understood why he wouldn't cut his hair. Nobody got it. Not even Terry. Not even Leon. They didn't understand why all the violence of the new music appalled him. Ray thought - I can get all that at home. Terry walked east along the great artery that links the city's entertainment area and its financial district, the fun and the money, his DMs tramping down New Oxford Street, High Holborn, Holborn - nothing open, everything closed, apart from the odd Dunkin' Donuts and, somewhere to the south, the meat market where his father was working through the night.

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And every step of the way he thought about her. He should have seen it coming. Should have seen the end in the beginning. That guy crying in the rain outside Terry's bedsit, he was a married man called Acid Pete. What kind of a girl has a married man crying in the rain? What kind of a girl knocks about with someone called Acid Pete?

A girl like Misty, Terry thought. A wild girl. I should have seen the pink fake mink handcuffs and run a mile. The very first time I heard her recite some second-hand tosh about 'exploring my sexuality', I should have bailed out. I should have known there were too many miles on the clock when she said the doctor had told her to take a break from the pill before her ovaries exploded or something. I should have made my excuses as soon as I saw a copy of The Female Eunuch.

The girls he had known didn't mess with married men, especially married men with names like Acid Pete. The girls he had known read Cosmopolitan, if they read anything, not seminal feminist texts. And they started taking the Pill when they started going steady, then stopped when they got married - always a white wedding, always in church - unless they were still saving up for their first mortgage and the baby had to wait a while. They didn't have to take a break from the Pill because they had heen on it for so long.

The girls he had known might let you explore their breasts if the night was full of Blue Nun and romance, but they certainly didn't explore their sexuality. And, without an engagement ring on their third finger left hand, they weren't too keen on you exploring it either. Regular sex was for steady boyfriends. A blow-job was like getting eight draws on Littlewood's football pools, and when it happened, you had to break up with the girl immediately and tell all your friends. That was a drag, because you missed the girl, but witnessing the miracle of a blow-job was just too momentous to keep to yourself. A large part of Terry's life felt as though it had been dedicated to trying to get a hand inside some girl's bra in the back of some dad's Ford Escort. It wasn't like that with Misty.

She had her own wheels. And, being a wild girl, she never wore one. He remembered the first time he spoke to her.

He had joined The Paper as the blazing summer of 1976 drew to a close, but didn't exchange a word with her until the end of the year when he was sitting under a twinkling Christmas tree at Heathrow, rereading The Subterraneans, when Misty entered the airport lounge. They were meant to be doing a job together.

She was wearing one of her Alice in Wonderland dresses with a man's jacket over the top, and even behind her mirrored aviator shades, you could see that she was crying. Really crying. Sobbing her heart out.

Are you all right?' he said, closing his Kerouac and standing up. T'm fine,' she told him.

She flopped down on the hard airport chair, crying even harder, and he sat beside her. She partially lifted the enormous sunglasses, dabbing at her eyes with a screwed-up piece of toilet paper. Terry had no idea what to say or do, so he went off and bought two plastic cups of boiling hot tea and offered one to her.

'Never fuck a married man,' she said, taking the tea. 'They make a big fuss if you turn up at their home.' Terry tried to process this information.

T didn't know if you took sugar or not,' he said. 'So I only put one in.'

Misty took a sip of the brown liquid, flinching at the heat. 'You're sweet,' she said. Then she wiped her nose with the back of her hand, sniffed loudly and seemed to brighten. 'Any idea if our flight's on time?'

When Terry had joined The Paper, Misty had seemed as distant and glamorous as a pin-up.

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He saw her around the office, her cameras swinging from her neck, laughing with one of the older guys or talking to the photo editor as they looked at contact sheets of Generation X and Patti Smith and the Buzzcocks. She said hello to Ray if they bumped into each other, but stared right through Leon and Terry and avoided their office. One time Leon caught Terry watching her.

'Way out of our league,' Leon laughed, and Terry blushed and threw a wastepaper bin at him.

Terry learned from Ray that she was the full-time assistant and part-time girlfriend of an older photographer, a stringer for The Paper, a minor Sixties legend called Acid Pete who had taken pictures of Cream at the Albert Hall, the Stones in Hyde Park and Hendrix at the Isle of Wight, just before the end.

Acid Pete was a married man, and sometimes when he came by to see the photo editor his wife was in tow - Misty made herself scarce - one of those constantly smiling hippy chicks, the type who seemed both beatific and brainless. When Terry met Acid Pete in the office and shook his limp, hippy hand, Acid Pete seemed endlessly amused, impossibly experienced and as though he had taken just a few too many drugs.

Terry was intimidated by Acid Pete. He had seen so much and taken so many great photographs, and even at an age when the Queen must be getting ready to send him a telegram - forty-one? forty-two? - he was still seeing - screwing, Acid Pete would have called it - the best-looking girl - chick, or possibly lady, Acid Pete would have called her - in the office. The only thing that made Acid Pete bearable for Terry was the knowledge that the older man's glory days were gone.

Acid Pete didn't get on with the new music, didn't dig what he called 'the aggressive vibe' in places like the Western World, and soon he was seen looking forlorn in the photographers' pit of the Roundhouse, huddled inside his greatcoat, the buttons gone, and Misty was the one who was getting the assignments. Towards the end of the year, one of them was with Terry- flying up to Newcastle to join the Billy Blitzen tour, covering two dates in Newcastle and (ilasgow for a centre spread.

'Kerouac,' she said, drinking her tea and clocking Terry's copy Of The Subterraneans. 'He's a real hoy's writer, isn't he?' Wet-eyed tod smiling now. 'I bet all the writers you like are boy's writers.'

Terry felt like one of those cartoon characters with a question mark hovering above his head. 'What's a boy's writer?' 'You know. A boy's writer. Go on - talk me through it.'

He had no idea what she was going on about. 'Talk you through what?' She laughed happily. 'Your life in books, silly.' So he did. Or at least the ones he could recall.

'Well, I can remember my mum reading me Rupert the Bear for hours on end. And then there are the books at school that get to you. Treasure Island and Robinson Crusoe and Kidnapped. And To Kill a Mockingbird and My Family and Other Animals and Travels With My Aunt. I loved My Family and Other Animals, I wanted to live on Corfu… And then you get a bit older and you start making your own reading list - I remember Ian Fleming at eleven, all the Bond books. "The scent and smoke and sweat of a casino are nauseating at three in the morning." The first line in the first 007 book.'

She smiled, took off her aviator shades, nodded. Her eyes were a shade of green he had never seen before. Maybe it was the tears.

'And then this funny period,' he said, 'when you're in your early teens and you're reading what's supposed to be trash - Harold Robbins, Airport, Valley of the Dolls - and the big bestsellers - Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and Alive! - and you're also getting into Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald and J. D. Salinger and Catch 22 and Lolita and Norman Mailer. And then you realise there are all these great journalists out there - Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson and…'

They called their flight. Terry felt a stab of disappointment. He enjoyed talking to her.

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'Well,' she said, pressing his chest with her boarding card. 'At least you like Rupert the Bear.' 'I am going to nail that little picture snapper before she gets off the bus,' said Billy Blitzen's manager. 'What's her name? Foggy? Smoggy? Well, boys, I'm going to nail Foggy's sweet little ass to the fucking carpet'.

The band all laughed, apart from Billy himself. They were at the sound check for the gig, and Misty hadn't come along, had stayed at the Holiday Inn making heated calls to London. And Billy swung his guitar on his hip and led Terry to the side of the stage. 'She with you, man?' said Billy. 'This Misty with you?'

He was a sweet man. A good man. Terry's favourite musician. Because of what he had done with the Lost Boys, and because he was still great on stage. But mostly because he was the only one who cared enough to ask Terry that simple question. But what could he say? 'No, Billy,' Terry said, attempting a smile. 'Misty's not with me.' Billy sighed. 'Well, I guess that's all right then.'

Despite the Aerosmith and Kiss cassettes the band listened to on the bus, Billy Blitzen and the P45s conformed to the dress code of Max's Kansas City and CBGBs - ties as thin as liquorice, drainpipes tighter than a coat of emulsion, second-hand suit jackets and fluffed-up Beatle cuts that could have been worn by the Byrds in 1966.

But their manager was old school, a lawyer from LA in cowboy boots who had graduated from Harvard Business School and cocaine. He had been around for years and he knew how it worked.

Now he raised his voice in the empty student hall, for Billy's venues were getting smaller by the month, and the P45s laughed and clapped. 'Nail her ass to the fucking carpet!' It was a great show that night - the longhaired students out of their minds on real ale as Billy mimed jamming a spike into his.? in and the entire student union hall sang along to 'Shoot Up, everybody'.

They went back to the bar of the Holiday Inn. The band and the manager and Terry and Misty and the few local kids of both sexes who always managed to tag along, offering drugs, sex or flattery.

Terry didn't talk to Misty. It was different on the road. They both had a job to do. And by the time he gave up, realising that she was not for him, the drugs were all gone, the bartender had started mixing the screwdrivers with orange cordial, and Misty was in a corner talking to the LA cowboy. «

Terry never found out what happened in the bar after he turned in. He didn't want to know. But Misty knocked on his hotel room door just after midnight, unafraid but seeking refuge, and that was the start of it all for Terry Warboys and his cat-faced darling.

That first night was the best night, at least for him. He would never forget the sight of her when he woke up just before dawn, sitting on a sofa in her pop socks, smoking a black cigarette called a Sobranie. And they did it again, getting their hat trick, because there was something about the combination of the pop socks and the Sobranie that drove him wild.

And then in dawn's early light he found her standing above him, naked now, the pop socks gone, and holding the pink fake mink handcuffs.

Are you into submission?' she said.

Terry stared up at her with bleary eyes.

T don't know,' he said. 'What label are they on?'

They took it from there.

If he was going back to his bedsit, he needed to head north, find a night bus. But he couldn't face the poky little flat and his lumpy mattress tonight. Not with the speed still in his veins, not with Misty in some hotel room, exploring her sexuality. Everything in his life made sleep unthinkable.

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I believed, he thought. Believed in her, believed in him. Listened to his records when no one was buying, when no one cared -loved Dag Wood before he was cool. Terry had believed, even when Bob Harris sneered, 'Mock rock.' Believed and was betrayed.

And believed in her too, Terry thought. Believed in her most of all. Saw something in that face that made me want to give up on every other woman in the world. How fucking stupid can you get?

He tramped on through the night, turning up the collar of his dead man's jacket against the chill, and it was only when he veered left at London Wall that Terry realised where he was going.

With the big white buildings and the statues of men on horses behind him now, he headed up the City Road, and suddenly he could feel the poverty among all those blocks of council flats, those ramshackle boxes that some dumb architect had thought was a clever idea ten or fifteen years ago, stretching off into the darkness all the way to the Angel.

The blackness was broken by one colossal building. It stood there halfway up the City Road, every light blazing, the night air reeking of the product it made. The gin factory.

Why had he come back here? To the place he had tried so hard to leave? He knew it had something to do with life becoming more complicated than he had ever imagined.

A regular girl bored you, but a wild one made you miserable. One made you feel like a prisoner, and the other made you feel like you were nothing. One of them wanted to marry you, have babies, and keep you locked up for ever. And the other one wanted to fuck strangers.

He wanted his old life back. The simplicity of it, the modest comforts. A girl who loved you and stuck by you, even if the price you paid was the prison of marriage.

He had thought that this new life would set him free, and yet every day there were new rules to learn. Don't be too heavy. Don't be too macho. Don't care too much.

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NINE

It was a different kind of club. 'Members only,' the man on the door told Ray.

He was one of those teak-hard old Cockney geezers, blurred navy tattoos displayed under the short sleeves of his drip-dry bri-nylon shirt, and what was left of his hair brushed straight back.

A bit like Henry Cooper, thought Ray. But he couldn't imagine this one smiling his way through a Brut commercial with Kevin Keegan. Here was the anti-Henry. He looked as though he would fill your cakehole in as soon as look at you.

Ray peered over his shoulder at the dingy, bamboo-clad bar. Loud, laughing people moved through clouds of cigarette smoke, the men in suits, the women in flared denim. Somewhere Matt Monro was singing.

'I came here once with Paddy Clare,' Ray explained. 'Paddy, who writes the pop page in the Daily Dispatch?'

The doorman looked exasperated. 'Look, sonny, I don't give a flying toss if you came here with Princess bleedin' Margaret and all the fucking corgis. It's members only. Got it?'

Ray nodded, but he was reluctant to turn away. He touched his bare wrist anxiously. He didn't own a watch. Hadn't needed one until tonight. He had never really seen the purpose of a watch. To Ray, a watch was something belonging to his father's world - like ties, and shined shoes, and the speeches of Winston (Churchill. A watch meant work. And what did Ray know of that? The Paper wasn't work. The Paper wasn't a job. He could see his old man now, synchronising his Omega to the chimes of Big Ben coming out of a tinny transistor radio. But with the night running out, he began to see the reason for watches at last. How long before John caught the plane to Tokyo? How much time did he have?

Touching his wrist again, Ray peered over the shoulder of the keeper of the door. This wasn't his type of place - there didn't appear to be anyone under the age of forty in the room, or anyone who wasn't wearing a cheap suit stained with food and drink, but he didn't know where else to go. All he knew was that the Empire Rooms never closed.

Ray had once spent an alcoholic afternoon in there. He had been sent to cover an Art Garfunkel press conference as one of his first jobs for The Paper and found himself sitting next to a sweating man in a crumpled three-piece suit. It was Paddy Clare, author of the Sounds Groovy! page in the Daily Dispatch.

He smelled a bit - a strange brew of Guinness and fried food and Fleet Street sweat - but he was very friendly to Ray, this fifteen-year-old wearing a denim jacket with school shirt and trousers, and he politely wondered if the younger reporter would fill him in on the artist's recent career.

'So what's this curly-haired cunt been doing since Simon and Garfunkel split up?' was how Paddy put it.

Ray took a breath and told him. He knew this stuff inside out. The career of someone like Art Garfunkel had been stored away without even trying. So he told Paddy about the two solo albums, the two giant hit singles - the exquisite 'All I Know' and the unconvincing T Only Have Eyes for You' - plus some very interesting work as an actor. Catch-22, Carnal Knowledge. 'Also, he's pitch perfect,' Ray said, warming to his theme, 'and

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he has a degree in mathematics and they say he is going to record the theme tune for that cartoon about rabbits - what's it called?' Paddy Clare looked thoughtful. 'Bugs Bunny?' he suggested. Ray shook his head. 'Watership Down.'

Paddy Clare's yellow teeth glinted with delight. 'I owe you one, kid,' he said, seeming genuinely grateful. But Paddy had a notepad with Art Garfunkel scribbled at the top of a blank page, and Ray couldn't help noticing that nothing he said was considered worthy of writing down. Perhaps Paddy had a photographic memory.

Then Art Garfunkel appeared, a tall, beaky, bookish-looking man surrounded by the usual record company flunkies and management, and Paddy Clare raised his chewed Biro, the mangled blue plastic gleaming with spit. 'Art,' he said, 'is it true that you and Paul hate each other?'

Art Garfunkel looked pained. The record company flunkies frowned and flapped.

Any chance of a reunion then?' probed Paddy. 'Did romance' -Paddy Clare bared his yellow fangs at the word, and made it sound like anal sex with a barnyard animal - 'bloom with any of your co-stars? Are you really doing a remake of Bugs Bunny?' It was a different kind of writing.

But Paddy Clare took a shine to the boy by his side, and after the strained press conference was cut short the old hack invited Ray for 'a swift one at this little place I know'.

The Empire Rooms was billed as a private club, which made it sound very grand to Ray, but the shabby reality was a basement with a bar in a dustbin-strewn yard off of Brewer Street on the eastern side of Soho. Frayed curtains permanently drawn, potted plants wilting in the gloom, plastic Pernod ashtrays overflowing with fag butts. And all these pissed old people with no special place to be.

Paddy told Ray that there were hundreds of these places dotted around Soho, skirting the licensing laws by restricting entry to members only. And Ray wondered who were the members? Anyone

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the despot on the door decided was a member, Paddy said. They Hayed for six hours.

When it was over, and unbelievably the Soho night was just beginning, Paddy - still sober but sweating more heavily than ever - went back to Fleet Street to write his column while Ray staggered the length of Brewer Street before puking up from one end of Old Compton Street to the other. From Wardour Street to the Charing Cross Road, heaving all the way. 'Still here, are you?' said the anti-Henry. 'You a member yet?' Ray shook his head. 'Not yet, no,' he said politely.

The doorman's eyes blazed. 'Go on, you little herbert -. fuck off out of it before I give you a good hiding.'

Ray trudged back up to the top of the filthy staircase, peering out at the soft rain falling on Soho. What time was it anyway? When did the planes start at Heathrow? And then he heard someone call his name.

Paddy Clare was laughing at the bottom of the staircase, gesturing for Ray to join him. The hawk-faced bruiser on the door was still glaring up at Ray, but Paddy indicated that it was all right. Ray smiled shyly and came back down the stairs. Paddy Clare put a protective arm around his shoulder as the man at the door shoved a thick finger in Ray's face. 'No bluies, no reefer,' he said. 'Or I'll give you a fourpenny one.'

'Why is he so nasty?' Ray asked Paddy as he led him into the smoky gloaming.

Albert? Well, the Empire Rooms are not really a club. It's more like a private cocktail party. Or a fiefdom. Yeah, that's it - it's a fucking fiefdom. Nobody- none of the regulars - calls it the Empire Rooms. They call it Albert's Place. And Albert doesn't usually get your type in here.' Paddy's yellow teeth shone in the ill-lit room. 'You know - the flower people.'

Ray breathed in a lungful of cigarette smoke. He rubbed his bare wrist. This wasn't where he needed to be. 'I'm looking for Lennon,' Ray said, pushing his hair back. At

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least he was drying out a bit. 'You know? John Lennon of the Beatles?' Although Paddy Clare wrote the Sounds Groovy! column, Ray was never sure exactly how much he knew or didn't know about the contemporary music scene. Sometimes it felt that Paddy's interest in pop music had ended with Billy Fury, Jet Harris and the Shadows, and other times it felt like Paddy had never had any interest in music in his entire life. 'He's in town for one night.'

Paddy nodded thoughtfully. He lifted his glass to his lips, but it was empty. Paddy seemed surprised.

'On his way to Tokyo with Yoko,' Ray said. 'My editor wants me to interview him. It's really important.'

Paddy considered Ray for a moment, then slapped him on the back. 'Don't worry, son, I'll give you a job on Sounds Groovy! when you're ready to join the big boys.'

Ray felt a wave of despair. 'Thanks, Paddy.' He smiled wearily and scanned the dark room, touching his bare wrist. Paddy led them to a table where fag butts were spilling out of an ashtray with Pernod written on it. He signalled to the barman and two glasses full of transparent liquid were slammed down in front of them. Ray took a sip and it was the most disgusting thing he had ever tasted in his life.

'Tastes like that stuff my mum used to give me for toothache,' Ray said. 'Clove oil.' 'Yeah, good, innit?' Paddy said. 'You can't beat a G and T.'

Ray gulped down another mouthful, grimacing, but not wanting to appear ungrateful.

'As for John,' Paddy said, 'the last I heard, he was down at the Speakeasy.' Ray gawped, the gin halfway to his mouth.

'I've got a couple of snappers down there.' Paddy Clare chortled into his drink. 'Never know what the pair of them are going to do next, God bless 'em. Staying in bed for peace. Sending back his MBE because "Cold Turkey" was going down the hit parade. Eating chocolate cake in a bag to stop the war - now what's all that about?' Ray stared at him in wonder. Paddy was a product of the old I'leet Street. Sometimes you felt like he knew nothing. And other limes you believed that he knew all there was to know. He was «»n his feet, scrambling, suddenly aware that he still had Terry's tape recorder with him. 'Thank you, Paddy'

Paddy looked pleased with himself. Ray could tell he was happy to help. Under that stained suit, there was a kind man.

'Told you I owed you one. Yeah, my editor's very excited - he loves John and Yoko - they're his two favourite weirdos. Fucking loves 'em, he does!'

Ray gulped down the remainder of his drink, not wanting to abuse Paddy's hospitality. He scanned the room for a clock. But there was no clock in Albert's Place. 'What time is it anyway?' Ray said.

Paddy looked at the younger man with sorrow and pity, gin-sodden tears in his rheumy eyes.

'Oh, it's very late,' Paddy said, and Ray's fingers touched his naked wrist. What was it about that face?

It was as though you could see her whole life in it. She would be a beautiful old lady one day, and she must have been a beautiful baby. There was something otherworldly about her face -something angelic. The face was alarmingly symmetrical, the face of the most beautiful girl in the world, as though God had placed everything exactly where it was meant to be. She looked like an improved version of the girl in The Last Picture Show. That was it. Like God's second attempt at Cybill Shepherd. The wavy blonde hair, eyes that could see into your soul. And a mouth built for snogging. Everything's just stuck on so nicely, Leon thought.

'My dad liked Elvis,' she said, shouting over Kool and the Gang. 'I remember watching him as a little girl - the films, you know,

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they would show them on Sunday afternoons. And he always seemed to be either in Hawaii or the army.' She smiled, and Leon's heart fell away. 'I thought he was a film star - like Steve McQueen or something. Clint Eastwood. Like that. I never realised he's a singer! Then her lovely eyes brimmed with grief, as though all those Sundays watching Elvis films with her dad were gone for ever. 'That he was a singer, I mean.'

Leon nodded enthusiastically, leaning close to her so she could hear, his mouth just inches from that face.

'We have a strange relationship with the music that our parents love,' he said, and she thought about it, smiled politely, and Leon cursed himself - why do you always have to try to say something clever? Now she thinks you're a pretentious wanker!

'Oh, I know what you mean,' she said. 'Because my mum likes Frankie Vaughan so I always sort of liked Frankie Vaughan.'

And when the talking was done, Leon did this impossible thing -he danced. Leon danced, and the world slipped away. He danced, forgetting about the Leni and the Riefenstahls gig he was meant to be reviewing, forgetting about the copies of Red Mist - abandoned on a table sticky with spilled alcohol - and almost but not quite forgetting about the Dagenham Dogs who were hunting him down. They would never find him in here. He would be safe in the Goldmine.

So Leon forgot about everything except the music and the dancing and the most beautiful girl in the world.

Leon danced - which in his case was a modest bobbing movement, his head nodding thoughtfully under his trilby, the index finger on his right hand raised, as if he was about to make an important point - but nobody cared! That was the glorious thing about the Goldmine. Nobody cared if you were cool, or doing the right thing, or just treating dancing as though it was another form of breathing! That's what he liked - oh, he really liked it - about this place.

It was its own kind of underground. He could see that. There were the dancers and the hard men and the peacocks, all with i hi-ir own rituals. But they left a little space for someone like Leon. I lc could sense that there was room for a non-dancing nerd such as himself. You just needed the confidence to take that giant step on to the dance floor. But Leon found that it was like stepping oil a cliff. Once you had done it, there was no going back.

Dancing - which to Leon had always seemed as physically impossible as flying - seemed like a normal part of human endeavour in the Goldmine. He danced through the anxious, frazzled feeling you get after one line of speed and no more, he danced through his come-down, and he danced out the other side.

Leon danced to records he had never heard - this wonderful music! Full of thick, meaty funk and strings as light as gossamer and voices that were as ecstatic as some heavenly choir - singers who could really sing, voices trained in church choirs and on street corners - and he was totally in thrall to the face of the girl in front of him. She stunned him. She paralysed him. Just being in the presence of that face made him pause, his tongue tied with self-consciousness. But she made it easy for him.

During a break in the dancing, when they went to the bar for a screwdriver (him) and a Bacardi and coke (her), she was just so unaffected and natural that his tongue, like his feet, could not stay tied for ever.

'Autumn Gold brings out a person's bones,' she said, and it turned out that's what she knew about, that's how she earned a living - cutting, crimping and dyeing in a salon called Hair Today. She gently lifted the brim of his hat to consider the merits of Autumn Gold. Leon took a half-step back.

'Oh, come on,' she said, smiling in that way she had. Leon couldn't tell if she was flirting or just being nice. 'Don't be shy.' 'Okay,' Leon said, grinning like a loon.

And then - how easy she made it seem - Leon found himself following the most beautiful girl in the world back to her natural habitat. Back to the dance floor. And time just slipped away, time was meaningless out here.

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Lights struck the crystal globe slowly twirling on the ceiling, throwing flashes of colour across a face he knew he would remember on his deathbed.

She danced with this gentle swaying motion - taking small steps on high heels - almost not moving at all - but somehow it looked to Leon like great dancing - her hair falling in her face, then shaken away with a smile, a secret smile, as if she had just remembered where she was, as if something mildly amusing had just occurred to her. She was perfect. Much better than Cybill Shepherd, Leon decided.

And there was this other thing - she was inseparable from the music. Leon danced for the first time in his life and those incredible songs - tales of a world devastated, or made complete, because of one love - would be impossible to hear again without thinking of that fabulous face.

'If I can't have you… I don't want nobody, baby…Ifl can't have you… oh-oh-OH!'

'Here,' said the most beautiful girl in the world. 'Have you got a cold?' Leon didn't want to lie to her. 'No,' he said. 'No, I've been taking drugs.'

She raised her eyebrows. He was terrified she was going to turn away. For the first time that night, he knew real fear. The fear of never seeing her again.

'Oh, you shouldn't take drugs,' she said. 'You're not yourself when you take drugs.'

Leon had never thought of it like that. And he suddenly realised that there was something he desperately needed to know.

'What's your name?' Leon said, when what he meant was - may I love you for ever? And she told him. Terry felt like a tourist in his own life. The factory hadn't changed. The metallic rumbling from the |UtS of the place, like some great ship in the night, the reek of 11 i.i I led barley and juniper berries that turned your stomach.

And he wondered what would happen to her stuff. In the past, breaking up was easy. The girls he had known lived with their parents. When it ended there was nothing to sort out. You went your separate ways and then, months later, you maybe saw them with some other guy and an engagement ring. Seen in a park, cJimpsed in a car, and then gone. It was more complicated when you lived together. There was all this stuff to sort out.

Her bags full of camera equipment, rolls of film, contact sheets, big cardboard boxes with ILFORD printed on the front. Her records by Nick Drake and Tim Buckley and Patti Smith. Her coffee-table books of Weegee and Jacques-Henri Lartigue and Dorothea Lange. Floaty dresses, skimpy pants, big boots. Some cracked tableware from Habitat. It had all arrived at Terry's bedsit stuffed into her father's Ford Capri, taking up every inch of the boot and the back seat and the passenger seat. Terry wiped his eyes, staring up at the factory. He supposed that her things would leave the way they had arrived. He didn't want to see it. He didn't want to be around for that.

He remembered the night she had moved in. The evening had begun the way every evening seemed to begin as 1976 became 1977 - with a trip to see a band. It was a few weeks after being on the road with Billy Blitzen. A few weeks after the midnight knock on his door. He was trying to stop thinking about her. They had both gone back to their lives in London. She had her married boyfriend, he had his one-night stands and his friends. There was plenty to do. Terry never stayed home. There was nothing to stay home for.

'Grab your kaftan,' he told Ray one night. 'I am going to take you to see some new music you'll love.'

At the foot of the tower there was a dusty little shop that sold sad souvenirs to the few tourists who made it across the river to Southwark Cathedral. Terry and Ray saw Leon in there, arguing

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with the Asian owner, pointing at a sun-bleached T-shirt in the window.

'But you can't sell this rubbish - it's racist,' Leon was saying. 'Do you understand?'

The offending item was designed to look like a band's promotional T-shirt. 'Adolf Hitler - European Tour: 1939 to 1945', it said, and under a picture of Hitler looking pleased with himself there was a list of countries resembling dates on a tour. 'Poland, France, Holland, Italy, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Rumania, Russia'. 'This only fashion,' protested the owner. 'Only trendy.' 'It's not remotely trendy!'

'You bad for business,' the owner said. 'You a trouble boy. You get out shop.'

'Come on, trouble boy,' Terry said, taking his arm. 'I'm going to take you to see some new music you will love.'

They caught the tube to the Hammersmith Odeon where Terry's name was on the door plus one. He talked to the press officer from Mercury and managed to get a plus two. And it was a great night - Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, one of the few bands they could all agree on. Fast and furious enough for Terry, jangly and longhaired enough for Ray, and enough like Dylan to keep Leon happy. They punched the air and sang along to American Girl' and 'Breakdown' and 'Hometown Blues' and 'Anything That's Rock and Roll' and even though Terry said that the real Heartbreakers were Johnny Thunders' band, there was something beautiful about this lot - it sounded like the kind of thing they would have heard on the pirate radio stations of their childhoods, but it was undeniably new music. In a black cab back to Terry's bedsit, the three of them argued all the way.

'It's too trad for me, Dad,' Leon said, and the other two jeered at him because the little fucker had been screaming American Girl' louder than any of them.

'But you hate hippies,' Ray said to Terry as they trudged down the musty hall to the six-quid-a-week bedsit. 'You hate all hippies!' T like lots of hippies,' Terry insisted. And Tom Petty's not a hippy'

'Name me one hippy you like,' Ray said, turning on the elec-11 ic fire in Terry's room. They would be here all night now. Talking ibout music, listening to music. Drinking vodka until it ran out, Miioking until the cigarettes were all gone. Maybe grabbing an hour or two's kip just before dawn, and then catching the bus to The Paper. 'John Sebastian,' Terry said. 'I love John Sebastian.' 'The Lovin' Spoonful,' Ray said. 'Looked a bit like John Lennon.'

'One of the greatest songwriters of all time,' Terry said. '"Didn't Want to Have to Do It", "Summer in the City", "Nashville Cats", "Younger Girl".' He cracked open a bottle of Smirnoff and poured shots into three filthy teacups. 'Incredible writer. "Do You Believe in Magic?" "Rain on the Roof" - I love this geezer! He's better than Dylan!'

'Oh, bollocks, he is,' Leon said, kicking off his DMs and lying down on Terry's mattress.

"Warm Baby", "Never Goin' Back",' Terry said. 'One of those Americans who fell in love with the Beatles but never stopped loving their own music. Blues, country - it's all in the mix, buried deep. And he slept with thirteen women at Woodstock.'

Leon sat up, impressed at last. 'Who did? John Sebastian? Thirteen in three days?'

Terry nodded. 'Had sex with thirteen women at Woodstock and still had time to perform a solo set.' He began excitedly flipping through his record collection. And then, when the Lovin' Spoonful was over, John Sebastian was still writing great songs, when he was a working musician, a writer for hire. He wrote this great song for the Everly Brothers - "Stories We Could Tell". All about being on the road and sitting on a bed in a motel and talking about all the things you've seen and done. The Everly Brothers did an okay version - but John Sebastian's version, that's the one…' Terry dug out a battered old album called Tarzana Kid. The

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vinyl was scratched and worn, and when Terry put the needle on the track he wanted, Ray could tell that this was a record that had been loved. They all had records like that. And the three of them sat there listening to this understated little song, slide guitars sighing under John Sebastian's voice, and Ray thought that it was the best song he had ever heard about friendship. Talking to myself again and wondering if this travelling is good… Is there something else a-doing we'd be doing, if we could? Then there was a knock on the door.

It was the guy down the hall, the manager of a couple of unsigned bands. Misty was behind him, breathless and laughing and lugging a tatty suitcase. They all helped her to carry her things in, even the guy from down the hall, because Misty was the kind of girl who men did those things for, and Terry did his best to hide his surprise that she had suddenly decided to move in without feeling the need to talk about it. They sat around awkwardly when all her things were in, and then Ray and Leon finished their drinks and slipped away.

And later, after she had cried for a bit, and they had made love and she had fallen into an exhausted sleep, he saw the marks on her body, all these dark marks on her arms and legs, just about visible in the light seeping into his bedsit, bruises in the moonlight.

He had seen marks like that in Newcastle, the first night, and he had even asked her about them, and believed her when she said, 'I mark easily, I just bumped myself,' because he wanted to. It was too hard to think of anything else. But now he could see that they were not the marks you get from bumping yourself, no matter how easily you bruise.

Nobody knew they were together then. Apart from Ray and Leon, nobody knew. Not until Terry went into the picture editor's ?llice the next day and hit Acid Pete so hard that he broke Acid Pete's jaw and two of the fingers on his right hand. Then they knew.

Minutes later, in the office of Kevin White, woozy with the pain in his smashed hand, the editor was almost in tears of frustration and anger, asking Terry how he could do anything but sack him.

T can't stand it when men knock around women,' Terry said. They stared at each other for a long while. 'For whatever reason,' Terry said.

'Get out of my sight,' White said, and at first Terry thought he had been fired. Then he realised he was being sent back to his desk. And he knew that he would owe Kevin White for ever.

Now nobody knew they were apart. But they would know soon. And they would all have a good laugh, and they would be right to laugh at him, Terry thought. What else did he expect? How else could it end when the start was such a miserable fucking mess?

Terry walked through the iron gates of the gin factory and the security light snapped on, blinding him for a moment, making him raise his hand to his eyes, and he saw the shadow that he cast looked just like a bruise in the moonlight. Ray was shocked to see the pack of photographers outside the Speakeasy. Somehow he had imagined that he would be the only one looking for Lennon. But there must have been twenty of them, jostling for position behind both sides of a roped-off scrap of red carpet, laughing and complaining, craning their necks at the rock and rollers who came and went from the Speak.

They were a curiously old-fashioned crowd. Longhaired girls in skin-tight leather trousers and primped men in wide lapels and tight leopard-skin strides. A race of Rod Stewart doppelgangers and Britt Ekland lookalikes. It was as if the new music had never happened, Ray thought, as if the Western World did not exist. He watched them marching on the red carpet outside the Speakeasy with what seemed like a curious mix of pride and shame, because

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although they were preening in front of a mob of photographers, nobody thought it was worth taking their picture.

But Ray could feel the random electricity that always surrounds one of the greats. He had experienced it just once before, when The Paper had sent him to cover a Keith Richards drug bust back in January in the litde town of Aylesbury, and Mick Jagger had suddenly strolled into the tiny public gallery. That same wild mega-wattage now ebbed and flowed through the night. The pack of picture-grabbers, the ageing showbiz kids entering the Speak, and Ray himself-they could all feel it. The proximity of greatness. 'Is he in there? Is he in there? What's he doing? Who's he with?' There was a carnival atmosphere, a party mood, but with an overcoat of tension. It was a special night for all of them. A night to never forget. But there was the chance you could miss something. Ray stared around, uncertain where to go, feeling the gin and tonic giving everything a sickly haze. One of the photographers was singing what at first sounded like a sea shanty. No - something else, chanted merrily to the tune of'What Shall We Do With the Drunken Sailor?' What shall we put in the daily paper? What shall we put in the daily paper? What shall we put in the daily paper? Early in the morning?

Ray stepped on to the red carpet. That was the way to go. If he had little in common with all the old Rod Stewarts, he had even less in common with the hardened pros of Fleet Street. And John was in there. John was so close now. Ray could feel himself shaking.

Ray walked across the red carpet and the young woman on the door looked at him as if he was dancing on her granny's grave. She was flanked by two large skinheads in black Crombies. They frowned at Ray as if he had posed a question that needed thinking about.

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Scroungers on the dole who guzzle Union chiefs who need a muzzle Plus the winner of our crossword puzzle Early in the morning. 'Hello,' Ray said, smiling shyly. 'Ray Keeley of The Paper! 'No press.'

'I'll pay,' said Ray, pulling out a handful of change. Usually it was enough being with The Paper, but not always. At the Marquee you sometimes had to fork out your seventy-five pence just like everyone else. How much was it here? The woman's face twisted with a withering smirk. 'Oh, I don't think so,' she said. Awful international crisis Idiot reader wins three prizes See how the public rises Early in the morning.

Ray retreated, his face burning, spilling a few coins on the red carpet as he went. He stopped to pick them up and dropped Terry's tape recorder. It landed with a clunk. He was afraid the photographers might laugh at him, but it was as if he didn't exist. Nobody existed for them apart from the thirty-six-year-old man inside the club. Ray sloped to the back of the pack - he could see now that some of them were standing on ladders - and examined the dent in Terry's tape recorder. Some of it's truth and some of it's lying What's the odds if the public's buying? We're the lads never leave off trying Early in the morning! And then it all happened at once. The flashlights going off, the

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voices raised, the surge of excited bodies. The bouncers pushed forward and were pushed back, almost overwhelmed. 'JOHN! JOHN! OVER HERE, JOHN!' 'ONE THIS WAY, JOHN! ONE THIS WAY!'

And then Ray's eyes were widening and his pulse was racing because there he was, glimpsed through the frantic crowd - John Lennon in the bewildering flesh. John! His hair was shorter than Ray had expected, almost like a grown-out crop, and he was thinner - maybe thin for the first time in his life. Ray felt himself falling forward, caught an elbow in his face, and shoved back. He wasn't missing this.

Through the camera flashes and flying arms, there he was, there he really was - round wire-rim glasses, denim jacket and jeans -like me, Ray thought! - the small woman with a riot of black hair bustling by his side. Oh, that was definitely John Lennon. Ray Keeley didn't breathe, and he had one foot on the first step of a ladder, and he could see quite clearly now. The glasses on the man's face were round golden orbs in the glare of all those flashbulbs.

'WHAT ABOUT ELVIS DYING, JOHN? ANY COMMENT ON THAT?' Elvis - dead?

Through the flashing lights and over the heaving shoulders of the photographers, Ray saw something beyond the lenses, he truly did, but just for a moment and then it was gone, the glasses impenetrable once more in the shine of the flashlights, John and Yoko hustled into the back of the Rolls-Royce purring by the pavement. But Ray had seen it in his eyes, and he couldn't mistake it for anything else. It was… anguish. Before Elvis, Lennon had said as a young man, there was nothing.

Now John's hero was gone, and he hadn't known about Elvis, Ray was certain of that, John had not known until now. And Ray Keeley's hero was gone too, the Rolls pulling away fast with a couple of the madder photographers chasing it, firing without aiming into the windows, like they do for some celebrity prisoner, thought Ray with revulsion, somebody on trial - and the rest of them were already turning away, laughing and complaining, the mood jolly now that the prey had been found, and even the woman with the clipboard was smiling with the bouncers as if they had all been presented with a few seconds that they would talk about for ever. Only Ray felt as if he had failed.

He stood on the red carpet trembling, and nobody cared. He had found him and lost him. And he had been nuts to think he could get closer than these proper newsmen. It was all over. 'Ray? It's you, isn't it?'

A woman had come out of the Speakeasy. Slim, pretty, long black hair. Tight pink jeans and a leather jacket and high heels. Funky but chic. Maybe ten years or so older than Ray. Late twenties. She was smiling at him. 'You don't remember me, do you?' He nodded. 'I do, I do.'

And he did. She was the wife of the manager of one of the biggest bands in the world. She was nice. A Rolling Stones fan, Ray remembered. One of those women who think that the important one was Brian Jones.

Her husband's band had made a little go a long way. They had started out as a pub rock band, banging out souped-up rhythm and blues in the Nashville and the 100 Club and Dingwalls, but a couple of big hit singles had sent them through the roof.

Ray had done a piece on them at the end of a triumphant tour of America, in front of basketball stadiums full of college kids screaming 'Whooh! Rock and roll!' and solemnly holding their cigarette lighters above their heads, as if it meant something more than a faked sense of community, a Seventies parody of the Woodstock spirit.

The woman looked rich, and Ray knew it was because the new music had arrived too late to swamp her husband's band. Their small, pugnacious manager had told Ray at the end-of-tour party that he saw his band's career on the college circuit of the USA. England was dead, he said. Johnny Rotten could have England.

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Ray had met his wife at the same party, on the roof of a hotel overlooking Central Park. At an event that was awash with cocaine, tequila sunrise and self-satisfaction, she had seemed friendly and bored. They had talked about music, but not her husband's band. They talked about the Stones. Standing outside the Speakeasy she seemed distracted and agitated, as though she had just had something stolen. 'Mrs Brown,' Ray said. 'How you doing?'

She nodded, ignoring the question. 'Did you see Lennon?' She was pretty but there was a hardness about her, and Ray thought that maybe all rich people got that way. You would think that money would soften you, but as far as Ray could tell it seemed to do the opposite. Her husband had it too.

'Yeah, I saw him,' Ray said. He looked wistfully down the street. 'Thought I might interview him.' He looked back at her, and she seemed amused. 'Anyway,' he said, dismissing the idea.

'Don't know what all the fuss is about,' she said. 'He hasn't done anything for years, has he? And the Stones were always the better band.'

'Well,' Ray said, not wanting to get into it, and he realised what it was that stopped her seeming beautiful. She was just too pissed off. 'Well, I don't know about that.' He laughed nervously. 'I better get going. See you around, Mrs Brown.'

But she laid her left hand on his denim jacket. She was wearing a fat gold wedding ring and the biggest diamond ring that Ray had ever seen.

'Have one drink with me,' she said, smiling but with a strange note in her voice. Almost like she was shy about saying it. And she wasn't a shy woman.

Ray hesitated. Shouldn't he be - what? Chasing the Rolls-Royce? Staking out the VIP lounge at Heathrow? Clearing his desk? 'Go on - one drink,' she urged. 'Do you know what day it is?'

He thought about it. 'The day Elvis died?' Ray said. 'Is that true? Is Elvis really dead?' She pulled a face, as though he was a waiter who had got her order wrong. 'Apart from Elvis dying,' she said. Then she smiled. She had a good smile when she gave it a chance, Ray thought. 'Today's my birthday.'

Ray wished her happy birthday, but she was already on her way, and he found himself following her to the door. The woman with the clipboard and the men in Crombies stepped aside. Ray saw that everyone stepped aside when Mrs Brown was coming. He looked around with interest. He had never been here before. 'This place is getting really tired,' she said.

But Ray was impressed. The Speakeasy was much plusher than the clubs he usually went to. It was much bigger, for a start, with red velvet chairs and sophisticated lighting and waiters asking you what you wanted to drink. But there was a large empty stage and an unmistakable feeling of anti-climax now that Lennon had gone. There were plenty of free tables. They found one. A waitress came over, this Linda Lovelace type that you never saw in the places Ray went to. 'What do you want?' Mrs Brown said, removing her jacket.

Ray mumbled his order, and the Linda Lovelace frowned, shaking her head, as if Ray was a kid who was out past his bedtime. 'What's he say?' Ray cleared his throat. 'Scotch and coke, please.'

'I'll have the usual,' Mrs Brown said. She was smiling at Ray. 'You're going to have to speak up when you interview John Lennon, you know.'

Their table was lit by a red light bulb in the shape of a candle. Her long, bare arms were resting in front of her. Ray peered at her watch in the darkness. 'What time is it anyway?' She glanced at her watch, and it flashed gold in the gloom. 'Who cares?' she said.

Linda Lovelace brought the tray. Ray felt that he should really get going. But he remembered his manners, and lifted his glass.

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'Well - happy birthday, Mrs Brown.' She laughed, nodded. They clinked glasses.

'Thanks for having a drink with me,' she said, and he was embarrassed. She seemed like the loneliest person he had ever met. But she was pretty and rich and her husband managed one of the biggest bands in the world. How could she be lonely?

'No - you know - I'm happy to,' Ray stuttered, lost for words. "Very happy to have a drink with you on your birthday.'

She lit a cigarette, exhaled through her nose, narrowing her eyes. She pushed the pack across the table to Ray. Marlboro. He helped himself. 'You know my husband, right?' Ray nodded. 'Sure. I mean, not very well.'

'But you know him,' she said, keen to get to her point. 'Do you know what my husband bought me for my birthday?'

Ray shook his head. He had no idea. How would he know? 'Go on - have a guess,' she said, and it sounded like an order.

Ray shrugged. He knew it would not be the kind of present his father bought for his mother. It would not be bath salts and a box of Black Magic chocolates. He knew that much. 'I don't know.'

She stubbed out the cigarette as if she had never really wanted it. 'Well - guess.'

Ray racked his brain, sipping his Scotch and coke. She ran a hand through her long dark hair and her wrist and fingers glittered.

'A watch?' Ray suggested. He knew it had to be something expensive. That was for sure.

'A watch? Did you say a watch?' Her face was pretty and angry. Ray didn't understand what was going on. 'No, he didn't buy me a watch, Ray. A watch would have been nice. No - you're never going to guess it, so I'll tell you. My husband bought me a vibrator for my birthday. What do you think about that?' Ray didn't know what to think. He had never even seen a vibrator. But somewhere inside him he knew it was a hateful thing to give to your wife. Especially on her birthday. Maybe Black Magic chocolates and bath salts weren't so bad after all.

'Say it with flowers,' Mrs Brown said. 'Isn't that what they say? They say you should say it with flowers.' Ray stared at the ice in his drink. 'I don't know. I guess so.'

Mrs Brown laughed, truly amused. She finished her drink and signalled for the waitress. 'Let me tell you,' she said. 'You can say it a lot better with a vibrator. That should be the catch phrase, Ray. Say it with a vibrator.' Linda Lovelace appeared.

Another round,' Mrs Brown said, ignoring Ray's half-hearted protests. The waitress nodded and left. Ray hurried to finish his drink. He didn't know if he could keep up with this woman. He suspected not.

And what is he saying?' said Mrs Brown. 'What is he saying -this husband of mine who bought me a vibrator for my birthday?'

Ray knew an answer wasn't expected. So he just waited, sipping his Scotch and coke, staring at the wife of the manager of one of the biggest bands in the world, wondering how someone that lovely could ever be so sad;

'I do believe,' said Mrs Brown, as their drinks were laid before them, 'that my husband is telling me to go fuck myself.'

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TEN

The security light died and there was the factory's ancient caretaker, PJ, grey and wispy, rolling himself a cigarette in a wooden cubbyhole the size of a coffin.

'Didn't expect to see you again,' he said to Terry, running the tip of his tongue over a Rizla.

PJ had changed into his stripy pyjamas. That's why they called him PJ. Get past the witching hour and PJ would put his jammies on, bring out the Old Holborn, and get ready for what he called a good old kip. 'Thought you'd be flying all over the world with those drug-taking weirdos.' 'That was last week,' Terry said. 'Are they up there?' A thin smile. 'Where else they got to go?'

Terry went inside the factory, and it was strange to be here after the best part of a year on The Paper. He looked around at the great expanse of the bottling plant, silent and still now, the conveyor belts snaking all over what looked like a giant aircraft hangar. He had thought he would never come back. But being here was oddly comforting.

The place was in darkness, but one floor up he could see fluorescent lights blazing. The data-processing department never closed. Everybody else - in the bottling plant, in the offices - was given lice gin at the stroke of six and told to bugger off home thirty minutes later. But the young people who attended to the needs of the factory's monolithic computer worked around the clock, pulling twelve-hour shifts, eight at night to eight in the morning. And all of it done on a bellyful of gin.

Computer operator - it had sounded modern and intellectual to Terry, but it was just manual work for kids who had left school with five? Levels and a certificate for swimming their width. Kids like Terry - restless, reluctant to work in a normal office, wanting the world to shut its mouth and leave them alone.

Being a computer operator meant staying up all night changing giant spools of tapes, swapping disks as big as dustbin lids, and feeding payroll cheques, invoices and inventories into a metal printer the size of a car. The best thing about the job was that you were totally unsupervised. You could do what you liked in here.

He sprinted up metallic steps to a tiny office littered with kitbags, half-eaten food and drinks, and there they were behind the glass, the white banks of the computer looming above the three of them. Peter, a good-looking boy with bad skin and long, lank brown hair, the one who was in a band, the music nut, his first friend at the factory.

Kishor, the Pakistani lad who wanted to be a programmer but couldn't find a firm who would give him a chance.

And Sally Zhou - real name Zhou Ziyi - her face frowning as she stood with Kishor staring at a message that was chattering out of the teleprinter on the keyboard. He had forgotten how much he loved her face. How had he ever forgotten that?

She looked up and saw him, shook her head and turned away, folding her arms across her small breasts. Then Peter was bounding out of the room, lank hair flying, laughing with disbelief.

'I can't believe it - what are you doing here? You should be -I don't know - on the road with Springsteen or Thin Lizzy or something.' Kishor came out of the computer room, grinning shyly, and

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then Sally was there, reluctandy, her arms still folded across those breasts, looking like Terry had let her down once and was never going to get the chance to do it again.

'You've been plucking your eyebrows,' she observed coldly. 'Looks ridiculous.'

How did he let this girl go? And how could he have been so strong, and so stupid? 'Hello, Sal,' he said.

'Girlfriend got the night off?' she said. Her accent was classic British-born Chinese. Pure Cockney, but with a hint of Kowloon in some of the vowels.

Terry shrugged, wanting to be cocky but feeling too sorry for himself. Like poor Rocky Balboa, misunderstood by the world. "What girlfriend?' he said. 'Maybe she dumped you,' Sally ventured. 'I'm right off women,' Terry said.

Peter laughed excitedly. 'All those groupies! Mate, you must be worn out!'

Sally smiled, her teeth shockingly white, her eyes like molten chocolate. 'Yes, she dumped him,' she said knowingly.

'The things you must have seen!' Peter said. He sat on the desk and clapped his hands. 'Concerts in America! Exclusive playbacks in studios thick with dope! Backstage rows! On the tour bus, with the Cuervo Gold and pure Colombian being passed around! Groupies! Groupies! Groupies!'

'Don't be blooming disgusting,' Sally said. She always was a bit of a prude, Terry remembered. At least in public.

'Oh my goodness!' Kishor said, blushing furiously, and Terry recalled how any talk of sex always embarrassed him. But Peter was dirty enough for all of them. He shuddered with delight, rubbing his hands together. T want to hear all about it,' he said. 'Well,' said Terry, 'I saw a woman take a leak.' Peter smiled uncertainly.

It had been during his first weeks on The Paper, when he was on the road with Lynyrd Skynyrd. He had been sent on the road by Kevin White as a punishment for taking speed in the office -or rather for letting one of the cleaners catch him at it. His first misdemeanour at The Paper. But he had liked the music - bar band boogie on an epic scale - and he had liked the musicians -a hard-drinking family of southern boys and girls. He still couldn't believe the life he was leading and every day brought some new adventure.

Terry had been in someone's hotel room, one of those crowded, boozy hotel rooms that you get on the road, talking to one of the boys in the band in the doorway of the bathroom because there was nowhere else to stand.

One of the backing singers - the short, good-looking one -had barged past them and pulled up her skirt, pulled down her pants and peed like she really needed to go. Terry's jaw dropped, although he tried to act as if he had seen many women pee. And it probably wasn't even her bathroom. Peter looked confused.

'But… you must have met all the stars. But… you met - I don't know. Mick Jagger. Keith. Rotten. Springsteen. The Clash. Debbie Harry. Debbie fucking Harry.'

Terry conceded that he had indeed met all of these people. 'But you feel that you sort of know them already, don't you?' he said. Peter looked blank - no, he didn't know. 'You've spent so long thinking about them, listening to them,' Terry said. 'So when you meet him, Jagger is sort of familiar. But I had never seen a woman pee before.' Peter punched Terry's arm playfully, as if he was a big kidder.

'Someone get this man a cup of tea,' Peter said. He picked up a can of soft drink. 'Or there's some G and T left in there, if you want something stronger.'

Terry smiled. That was what they always loaded up on before they came to work - gin and Tizer. Numbing themselves for the twelve-hour shift ahead. They wouldn't understand that up at The Paper. They would never understand that this was another kind

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of work. It wasn't fulfilling, or rewarding, or any of that middle-class stuff. You worked here to pay your way in the world, and that was the only reason you did it, and sometimes the tedium was so great that you needed to deaden a part of yourself just to get through the shift.

It was hard staying awake until eight in the morning, especially when you knew that other people your age were out on the town, or tucked up in bed, and it was even harder with a bellyful of gin and Tizer.

Terry remembered what else made it hard - the soporific jingles the radio played in those long hours before dawn. There was one jingle in particular that always made his eyes close and his head drop and his spirits sag, a jingle that sounded like it was sung by session singers who had just been buried under an avalanche of Valium.

'Cap-it-al… helps you make it through the night,' went the jingle that always knocked them out. 'Cap-it-al… helps you make it through the night'

But tonight the radio was different. Tonight there was wall-to-wall Elvis. 'King Creole' was playing on a tinny transistor radio. Peter turned it up. 'You hear about Elvis?' Peter said. Terry shook his head.

'Died in Memphis,' Peter said. 'Heart attack, they reckon. Forty-two years old. Bloody tragic, mate. He started it all, you know.'

Terry was shocked. Being invisible to the mourning Teds suddenly made sense. He had never imagined that Elvis Presley was dead. Elvis was one of those figures that had always been there at the back of your life, and you assumed they would be there for ever.

When Terry had been growing up, Elvis had always been slightly corny, a bit of a rock-and-roll Shirley Bassey, all grand showbiz gestures and big empty ballads. But now, listening to 'King Creole' on Capitol Radio the night he died, he felt the raw greasy magic in the music. Terry felt an unexpected surge of grief. Tears sprung to his eyes and he quickly wiped them away. Maybe it was just the speed.

'How's Land of Mordor doing?' Terry said. 'Got any gigs lined up?'

Land of Mordor was Peter's band. Terry had seen them once at the factory's Christmas disco. With their twenty-minute guitar solos and songs about elves, Land of Mordor had almost killed the party stone dead. Only food poisoning in the cocktail sausages could have been more of a downer.

Peter looked gloomy. 'Nobody wants prog rock any more,' he said. 'Look at the way they talk about Clapton. They want the new stuff.' He looked at Terry's spiked, dyed hair accusingly. 'The kind of crap you like. You know - two-minute songs about riots and pensions.' He brightened. 'But if you could get us a review…'

Terry pretended to be giving it serious thought. 'I'll have a word with the editor of the live pages,' he lied.

Kishor handed Terry a polystyrene cup of scalding brown liquid and he smiled gratefully, even though he knew it was undrink-able. He remembered how everything that came out of the vending machine looked exactly the same. And the boiling hot swill reminded him of other things - like half-filling a can of Tizer or Coke or Tab with gin as he argued with Peter about the merits of Harvest and Pink Floyd and Jimmy Page, and Kishor telling him about the things that were pushed through the letterbox of the newsagent's run by his parents in the East End, and the nights spent with Sally curled up inside her sleeping bag in one of the empty offices, her body slender and warm against him while Peter and Kishor took their half of the shift. That's what he remembered most of all. Gin-flavoured kisses and brown eyes shining and the feel of those slim limbs.

'Here,' she said, handing him the cup from the top of her thermos. A few leaves floated in perfumed water. 'It's not the kind you like. It's not Brooke Bond PG Tips. It's Chinese tea.'

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He set down the polystyrene cup and took Sally's drink.

'My favourite,' he said, and she looked at him as though she didn't believe a word of it.

Then they all looked up as the keyboard thundered out a message. The tapes had stopped revolving. 'Those payroll tapes need changing,' Sally said. 'Come on, Kishor.'

They went back into the computer room. Terry had been waiting for them to go. 'Got any stuff?' he asked Peter.

Peter smiled doubtfully. It was as if everything Terry said was not what he was expecting. 'You don't need me to give you stuff, man,' he said. 'Do you?'

'I'm right out and I need a bit of a lift,' Terry said. 'A bit of speed. Some blues, black bombers, anything you got.'

Terry knew that Peter bought the odd half-gram of amphetamine sulphate for six quid when Land of Mordor were rehearsing in his parents' garage. But Peter clearly thought that Terry should be getting his gear from Keith Richards' dealer. Or Keith Richards himself.

'But… what about all those rock stars, all those bands you hang out with?' Peter said. 'There must be stuff all around them. I mean - sex and drugs and rock and roll, right? That's what it's all about, right?'

'Cap-it-al,' sighed the radio. 'Helps you make it through the night…'

Terry felt his head drop. That racking jingle! Beyond the glass, Sally and Kishor were spooling fresh tapes on to the great white slabs. He sighed wearily.

'There's a bit of a drought in my neck of the woods,' Terry said. 'Haven't you got anything?' Peter looked bashful.

'All I've got is some Pro-Plus,' he said apologetically. His face lit up. 'But what we could do is, we could crush it up and snort it.' 'Pro-Plus?' Terry said, unable to disguise his distaste. 'You can buy that in any chemist. You don't think Keith Richards and Johnny Rotten score their stuff in Boots, do you?'

Peter's face was a mask. 'I haven't met Keith and Johnny. You tell me.'

Terry took a long pull on the Tizer can. He tasted the sweet red sugar drink, and the mule-kick of the gin close behind it. Pro-Plus! How low can you go? He would be smoking banana skins next.

But he said, 'Come on then,' and he helped his old friend to start crushing the little yellow pills to dust.

Sally and Kishor came back into the office. She stared at them with disbelief. 'Please don't tell me you're thinking of putting that stuff up your nose,' she said.

But Terry didn't tell her anything, and he didn't look at her, and he watched his old friend carefully pummel the Pro-Plus to yellow powder with the bottom of his thermos flask.

'Ah, sex and drags and rock and roll,' Peter said wistfully. 'Tell me all about it, Terry.' Ruby Potter.

Her name sent Leon into a rapture where he saw fleeting visions of future possible lives.

Ruby Potter. Ruby Peck. Mrs Ruby Peck. Mrs Ruby Potter-Peck. Leon Potter-Peck. The Potter-Pecks. Look, there go the Potter-Pecks.

But away from the swirling lights of the Goldmine and in the unforgiving glare of the doughnut shop, Leon learned that the most beautiful girl in the world already had a life of her own.

'You can call him if you want,' said her fat friend, picking a custard doughnut from the box on the table, and sending Leon's heart tumbling. 'There's a phone booth at the end of the road. Go on - why don't you call him?'

'But I don't want to call him,' said Ruby, her lovely face fierce with defiance. Dunkin' Donuts was lit like an interrogation room and, sitting

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at a Formica table that was bolted to the ground, Leon was forced to ask himself some tough questions.

Like, who the fuck were they talking about? And what was this bastard to Ruby? And how, oh how could Leon have been so dumb as to imagine that a girl like Ruby Potter could ever really be interested in a boy like him?

But when he looked at her face, none of it mattered. Leon looked at Ruby, and she smiled at him over a chocolate doughnut, and the world made sense. The bad stuff slid away and he lived in the blissful moment.

'Well, I don't know why you don't call him,' Judy said, removing a dab of cream from her lips. 'You know you want to.'

Leon saw it as a good sign that Ruby had a friend with a weight problem. What a wonderful heart she must have, thought Leon, to have a fat friend. How sensitive and deep Ruby must be, to not care about something as trivial as physical appearance. Beautiful on the inside as well as the outside, he sighed, poking a finger into his jam doughnut and then sucking the raspberry goo.

They didn't ask him what he did. That was strange because in the world of his parents, and even at The Paper, it was the given icebreaker. And what do you do? But not to Ruby and Judy. They came from a different kind of working world. He found out she was a hairdresser only after she had made a long speech about the merits and drawbacks of Autumn Gold.

T write about music,' he told them, hoping to impress. 'In fact, I'm working tonight.' Trying to sound important now. Do you have any idea how busy I am? 'I'm meant to do this thing,' Leon said. 'Do you want to see a band? There's this band I'm meant to see.'

'A band?' Ruby said, frowning, making Leni and the Riefenstahls sound like Joe Loss and his orchestra. He was hoping that she might come with him. He was hoping that they might make a night of it. But his career just seemed to perplex her. Going to see a band?

'So can you get tickets for Queen at Wembley?' Judy said, suddenly more interested. Leon tried to hide his contempt. He failed. 'Probably,' he said. 'But why would I want to do that?'

'Because Freddie Mercury's great,' Judy shouted angrily, 'you butt-fucking queer.'

Ruby slammed down her doughnut. 'Judy!' There was a grace about her, Leon thought, and somehow it illuminated her perfect face. She had no doubt left school at fifteen, and never had any of what Leon's father called his 'advantages'. But Ruby Potter had more natural grace than anyone he had ever met. 'Who have you met then?' Judy said.

Leon drew a breath. 'Bob Marley. Patti Smith. Joe Strummer. Paul Weller. Pete Shelley. Phil Lynott. Johnny Thunders. The Sewer Rats.' 'Have you met Abba?' 'No, I haven't met Abba.' Judy turned away with a sneer. 'He ain't met nobody'

And then Leon saw them. Dagenham Dogs. Two of them, one on either side of the street. Shaven heads gleaming. Coming towards Dunkin' Donuts, playfully tossing a dustbin lid at each other. Leon watched one of them catch the dustbin lid, stagger into the road, and hurl it back at his mate with full force. The dustbin lid went sailing over the head of the second Dog and clattered into the window right by their table.

Judy was on her feet screaming abuse, and Ruby dropped her doughnut. The two Dogs guffawed with delight and approached the window, rubbing the front of meir trousers and making obscene gestures. But by then Leon was under the table, on his hands and knees, watching Judy's foot stamping with fury. He didn't come out until he heard the Dogs retrieve their dustbin lid and go cackling off into the night.

'Found it,' he said, sheepishly coming back up. 'My contact lens. It's okay. Found my contact lens.' The two girls watched Leon putting the imaginary contact lens into his eye. Then he blinked at them furiously. 'That's much better.' 'Look, Ruby,' said Judy.

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She was indicating a car full of neat, well-shaven youths that had pulled up outside. A stocky youth in a cap-sleeved T-shirt and Prince of Wales check trousers got out of the car and walked into Dunkin' Donuts. Grinning broadly, he saw them and came over, sitting on the edge of their table. 'Well, well, well. Little Ruby Potter. As I live and breathe.'

There was a half-eaten chocolate doughnut in front of Ruby. The youth in the capped T-shirt plucked it up and popped it in his mouth.

'Oy, you mucky pup!' said Judy, punching his pale, hairless arm. The youth made a great show of enjoying the doughnut, smacking his lips and rubbing his flat belly. 'You suck,' Judy said. 'You blow,' snarled the youth. 'You wish,' said Judy. T know,' said the youth. 'Ignore him, Judy, and he'll go away,' said Ruby, all imperious. The youth laughed, and leaned closer to Ruby. 'Where's Steve tonight then?' he said in a stage whisper.

Ruby took a small round mirror from her handbag and made a great show of staring into it and rearranging a few strands of hair. 'Don't know, don't care,' she said.

The youth chuckled, as if he knew the awful truth. Leon smiled weakly. The bozo had not even bothered to acknowledge his existence.

'You want a lift back?' the youth said. 'We got the Escort outside.' He leaned on the table, leering in her face, oozing phoney sympathy. 'Don't worry - Steve will understand.' 'I don't care what Steve understands!' Ruby said, her voice rising.

Leon felt like crying. I should have known. Steve. Probably all the really good ones have a boyfriend called Steve who can kick your head in.

'Who's we?' Judy said. Leon could tell she was quite interested in the prospect of a lift home. 'You know,' the youth said. 'Ron. Alfie. Lurch.' Ruby and Judy rolled their eyes at each other. 'Those creeps,' Judy said. 'We don't need a ride,' Ruby said. 'We got one already'

Leon realised she was smiling sweetly at him. He wondered what it could possibly mean. Panic fluttered inside him. She didn't think he owned a car, did she?

'Suit yourself, darling,' said the youth, still cocky, although Leon could tell he was disappointed. 'We're right outside if you change your mind.'

He eased himself off the table, still acting as though Leon was invisible. And Leon thought - why is she surrounded by all these horrible people? I must save her. They show her no respect, they do not cherish her the way she deserves to be cherished. 'He'll tell Steve he saw you,' Judy warned darkly.

Ruby laughed, her eyes sly. 'He can tell Steve what he likes, can't he?'

Judy was all doom and gloom. 'Steve will go crazy… you down the Goldmine on your own…' A knowing look at Leon here. 'Having a good time…'

'Do him good,' Ruby said, and Leon saw that she was capable of being ruthless. The beautiful must be like that, he thought. They do what they want.

Then he was scrambling after the girls as they traipsed out into the street where a canary yellow Ford Escort was parked right outside Dunkin' Donuts. There were four youths inside, all of them wearing capped-sleeve T-shirts, all leaning out of the windows and grinning. None of them had cut their hair yet. Donna Summer's T Feel Love' was turned up on the radio. Leon quickly checked the street for Dagenham Dogs. But they had gone, no doubt off to join the mayhem at the Western World. There was an abandoned dustbin lid in the middle of the road. 'Oooh, it's so good, it's so good, it's so good, it's so…'

'Any more fares, please,' the tallest one shouted. 'Ding-ding!' He had to be Lurch. Judy leaned her head into the window but

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Ruby held back, waiting for Leon to say something. He stared at her helplessly. 'Where's your motor?' Ruby asked him. He spread his arms. 'I don't - I haven't…'

Judy turned on him, hands on hips, icy fragments of doughnut still on her lips. 'You haven't got a car? Then how are we meant to get home?'

He turned to Ruby, his head spinning. He would probably never see her again. 'I'm sorry,' he said.

Judy was already climbing into the back of the yellow Escort, squeezing herself between the two youths on the back seat. They all cheered. Donna Summer came closer to orgasm. 'Come on, Ruby,' Judy shouted.

But Ruby shook her head and turned away, her arms folded across her chest. They waited for a moment, making sure she really meant it, and then the Escort took off in a blur of burned rubber and 'I Feel Love'. Leon caught a glimpse of Judy on the back seat, giving him a two-fingered salute.

'What are we going to do?' Ruby said. 'How am I going to get back?' And then she noticed his bruise for the first time. 'What happened to your face?'

'Oh,' he said, touching his cheekbone. T got this on Saturday. Down at Lewisham. You know - the riot.'

'Oh,' she said. 'Lewisham. Yeah, my dad was there too. Protesting and that. He feels strongly about these things. Just like you.'

And Leon didn't dare ask. He didn't dare ask the most beautiful girl in the world which side her dad was on. Nothing. Not a thing.

Just nostrils caked with crushed Pro-Plus and nerves clattering with caffeine. Terry and Peter stared at Sally and Kishor on the other side of the glass, swapping reels of tape, the pair of them as busy as dockers with a ship in. 'It's all been done before, anyway,' Peter said. Terry looked at him. What was he going on about?

'All this new music,' Peter said. 'All this blank generation bollocks. The Stooges and MC5 did it first. Even before that. On the first Hendrix album. "I Don't Live Today" - that's about as blank as it gets. And then he died. Jimi died! Peter took a swig of flat Tizer and warm gin. 'What these bands are doing - it's all been done before.' Terry exploded.

'Not by us! Not by me! Fuck! I hate it when people say that!' He was on his feet. He was tired of hearing this stuff. He was tired of being told that everything was shit and nothing had happened since the Sixties. He wasn't young ten years ago - he was a kid. And he wouldn't be young in ten years' time - he would be an old man. This was his time. Now. Tonight. Right here. And it felt like some fucker was always trying to spoil it.

'I'm sick of having to bow down to all these old bastards in their thirties! You think Johnny Rotten's going to live to see forty? You think Rotten's going to turn into Des O'Connor? It doesn't matter what anybody else has done - we haven't done it!' Peter snorted. 'Tell you what - shall we nick some gin?' he said.

Terry only had to think about it for a moment. 'Yeah, all right. Let's nick some gin.'

There were always odd bottles of gin stashed at the bottom of desks in the office. It was the only thing to steal in the factory. Terry and Peter wandered through darkened rooms trying desk drawers until they found something. It was already half-empty. Some poor little clerk wiping himself out at elevenses. Peter unscrewed the cap on the bottle and took a long pull. 'Got any Tizer left?' Terry said.

Peter shook his head, taking a swig from the bottle, and grimacing with disgust. 'I hate this stuff,' he said. 'Yeah,' Terry said, taking the bottle. 'Worst drink in the world.' Leon stood outside the locked doors of the Red Cow, quietly cursing, and hours late for Leni and the Riefenstahls.

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'It looks shut,' Ruby called from the back of the black cab.

Leon peered through the dusty glass of the Red Cow, knowing it was pointless. He had missed the gig. Because of a girl. Because he was dancing.

And he knew this was serious. As long as the cleaners or the straights at Country Matters didn't see you, nobody cared what you did at The Paper. Kevin White didn't care if you shot up with Keith Richards, shared a spliff with Peter Tosh, or snorted sulphate with Sid Vicious. Nobody cared - as long as you did the work.

But whatever drug was in your system, and whatever rock star was turning blue in your bedsit, White and the older guys expected you to get your copy in on time. Among the chaos and chemical excess of The Paper, a steady work ethic endured. Clean copy, the correct length and on time. The only things they took seriously at The Paper were music and deadlines. 'You getting out or what, mate?' said the taxi driver.

But the good thing is, thought Leon, I already know what I think about Leni and the Riefenstahls. I don't really need to see the silly cow strutting about in her jackboots to know I don't like her. So what's to stop me writing about an event that I didn't actually see? It's just as true - isn't it? / know what I am going to write before I even start writing.

Leon turned back to the cab and Ruby's perfect face, happy again, and feeling like he was becoming a real journalist at last. The big problem was Dag Wood's penis.

Terry had seen it - an enormous, barnacle-encrusted todger that would not have been out of place in a porn movie. That giant knob haunted Terry's dreams, and filled his Pro-Plus reverie with anxiety and dread.

Terry had gazed upon the great beast, its helmet with the appearance of a monstrous lychee, not long after meeting Dag for the first time. The great man had been at the head of a long table at a restaurant in West Berlin. He was doodling on the linen tablecloth with a black felt-tip.

After being introduced to Terry, Dag had challenged him to a race through the streets of Berlin. Terry stared at him, wondering if he was serious. And when he realised that Dag was dead serious, he accepted. He knew he had no choice. So the pair of them left everyone else at the restaurant and ran through the empty streets at midnight. They ran as fast as they could, but halfway to the Hilton, Dag told Terry it was okay - they didn't have to run any more, and Terry knew he had passed some sort of test.

Then Dag asked Terry about the new music, what was happening in London, what he could expect and what the audiences would expect from him. It was only later, when Terry was a bit older, that he realised Dag Wood had been frightened - afraid he would not be able to live up to all those great expectations, afraid he would disappoint all those feral children waiting for him in London and Glasgow and Liverpool.

'Must be great though,' Peter said, staring into the gin bottle. It was almost empty. 'Hanging out with rock stars…'

Terry and Peter were sitting on the desks of the tiny office, watching Sally and Kishor work, listlessly passing the bottle between them. Elvis was on the radio, threatening sudden violence. It was the one about being a hard man. Trouble.

Maybe it was true, Terry thought. Maybe there was nothing new under the sun, and every generation dressed up and struck poses and thought they were too cool for school, but in reality it had all been done before. 'Free records, free gigs,' Peter said. 'What a life you lead, Tel.' Terry laughed bitterly. 'You're better off here, mate.'

Peter glared at him. 'Oh, bollocks.' He stood up, swayed and slurred. Pushed his face into Terry's so that he could smell the metallic stink of the gin. 'Great big hairy bollocks.'

'The truth is,' Terry said, knowing it was the last thing he wanted to admit and the last thing Peter wanted to hear, 'the truth

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is, it's not all it's cracked up to be.' He took the bottle, swigged, felt his stomach rise and wondered if he was going to throw up. 'These rock stars - they pretend they're your friends.' He thought of Billy Blitzen taking him to one side at the sound check in Newcastle. He thought of other good ones - Joe Strummer, Johnny Thunders, Phil Lynott. 'Maybe one or two really are - if you're lucky. But mostly they just… they use you. They want to be in The Paper. That's all. What do we sell? A quarter-million every week? Of course they're fucking nice to us! But it's all bullshit. And you think they're happy? The musicians? The bands? They're all terrified! The young ones are afraid they're never going to make it, and the old ones are afraid it's all going to end.'

The lead guitarist and main songwriter of Land of Mordor looked devastated.

'Then it's all… rubbish,' Peter said finally, taking the gin bottle and tipping what was left down his throat. When he saw it was all gone, he contemplated the empty green bottle for a moment and then hurled it at the glass that separated the office from the computer room. Sally and Kishor jumped back in alarm as the glass collapsed, and Elvis sang on, jittery with joy.

Peter had someone's thermos flask in his hand, and was hammering at the remaining glass panels until they broke, collapsed, shattered. Terry was chuckling with disbelief, Sally was shouting Peter's name and Kishor looked on the edge of tears.

Then Peter was in the computer room, ripping off spools and throwing them through the smashed windows, the streamers of shiny brown tape trailing behind them like toilet rolls at a football match, lashing out at the great white obelisks with his sandals, making Terry laugh harder as he hobbled with pain.

Sally had her arms around Peter's waist, trying to drag him away from the computer, while she shouted at Terry to stop him. 'We'll all lose our jobs!'

Kishor was in the office, babbling something about the step up to programming, the step that he was never going to make now, and Terry stopped laughing because suddenly it was all over, and the storm inside Peter had blown itself out, and he was lashing out at the monolithic tape stacks and only hurting himself, and it wasn't as funny as it had been before. And he couldn't stand to see Sally that upset. Then PJ was standing in the doorway, blinking in his pyjamas, a broom in his hands.

'You stupid, stupid little bastards,' he said. 'You better get this cleared by morning, or you're all out on your earholes.'

'Clear it up?' Sally said. 'How can we clear it up, you silly old sod?' She threw a broken spool at PJ, and glossy brown tape spilled out behind it. 'He's smashed the place up! Look at it!' _

Peter came back into the office, using the door - although there was no need to, he could have stepped right through where the glass used to be. He looked sweaty and shocked.

'Well,' Terry said, jumping off the desk and taking the broom from PJ, 'let's get cracking.' They all stared at him.

Sally laughed, shaking her head. 'You can't come back here just because your new life hasn't worked out. Don't you know that?' She placed her hand on Kishor's shoulder. 'Don't cry, Kish. We'll tell them - well, I don't know what we'll tell them. Burglars did it. Vandals.'

'But they'll never believe it!' Kishor said, wringing his hands. 'They'll know it's us!' Peter sat on the floor and covered his face.

Sally gently prised the broom from Terry's fingers. 'You should go now,' she said.

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ELEVEN

The meat market froze Terry's bones.

All around the great roaring cavern men in white coats smeared with blood loaded slabs of meat on to two-wheeled carts that looked like rickshaws and, with their breath steaming, transported their loads out to the waiting caravan of lorries and vans lining the perimeter of Smithfield with their engines idling. The freezing air was ripe with profanities as the men roundly swore at life and each other. It was hard work, and a long night. Terry's head reeled at the fact that his father had worked here since leaving school at fourteen.

He turned up the collar of his Oxfam jacket and stuffed his hands deep inside his pockets. The cold air made his eyes fill with tears and his breath come in short cloudy gasps. He walked down the central aisle, looking for his dad.

Terry found him hauling a giant side of beef on to his back, a great carcass of meat and bone that made his knees buckle for a moment before he recovered and staggered upright, face contorting like a weightlifter.

'My boy's here,' he gasped, his sweat-smeared face cracking into a smile at the sight of his son. He was wearing a hat that made him look like he was in the French Foreign Legion - a canvas cap with an expanse of white material coming out of the back, as if to keep off the desert sun. 'Help you with that, Dad?' The old man laughed. 'That'll be the day.'

Terry followed him through all the men in their bloody white coats and out of the market, the old man bow-legged with the burden on his back. Shuffling behind him, all Terry could see of his father were the grubby tails of his white coat and the worn-out heels of his boots. When he had deposited the meat in the back of a refrigerated lorry, he wiped his hands on his sleeves before slapping Terry on the back.

'My boy's here!' he shouted to no one in particular. 'He goes all over the world, interviewing film stars!' 'Dad,' Terry protested. 'They're not film stars.'

'Look at you,' the old man said happily. 'You're all skin and bone. You hardly touched your tea, did you? Let's get you something to eat.'

Even at these hours in the dead part of the night, the pubs around Smithfield meat market were doing good business. In fact, trade was picking up now that the porters were nearing the end of their graveyard shift.

Behind foggy glass windows, red-faced men in white knocked back pints of brown ale and drenched freshly made pies in HP sauce or sucked hungrily on cigarettes. Terry's dad ordered pies and pints and found them seats at a table surrounded by loud, exhausted-looking men. Terry was the only one not wearing a white coat.

'My boy,' Terry's dad explained. 'Goes all over the world interviewing these showbiz types.' His barrel-like chest expanded with a pride that made Terry blush. 'You could say he's a bit like Michael Parkinson, I suppose.'

The men looked moderately impressed. 'Who you interviewed, then?' one of them asked. 'Well,' Terry said, taking a mouthful of beef-and-onion pie. He

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paused, his stomach recoiling from the taste of hot food. When was the last time he had eaten? He remembered being on the plane back from Berlin, pushing away a foil tray of something that may have been chicken. And, with a stab of guilt, he remembered being unable to make a dent in the special meal that his mother had cooked for Misty. Take enough speed and your appetite seemed to fade away. 'I just interviewed Dag Wood,' he said, putting down his knife and fork. Blank faces around the table. 'And I've interviewed Grace Fury.' Nothing. Terry's dad was still smiling proudly.

'The Clash? The Jam? The Stranglers?' He was struggling now, but he didn't want to disappoint his dad. 'I did one of the first pieces on the Sex Pistols - and I wrote something when they did that secret gig at the Screen on the Green…'

The name pressed a nerve. 'The mob that called the Queen a moron?' said one enormous porter. 'They don't want to come down here on a dark night. We like the Queen round here.'

The other men chuckled at that, and made enthusiastic predictions of a 'good hiding' for any of the Sex Pistols that dared set foot in Smithfield. But their interest had been piqued.

'What about the birds in Abba? You meet them?' Lewd laughter and rolled eyes, pieces of pie dropped and retrieved. 'I wouldn't mind doing something in-depth with that blonde tart!' Terry had to concede that he hadn't crossed paths with Abba. 'What about the Beatles?' 'Elton John and Kiki Dee?' 'What about Disco Duck?'

Some of the more sophisticated music lovers chortled at that. 'The song's called "Disco Duck", you daft cunt. The singer's Rick Dees and His Cast of Idiots! Listen to him with his Disco Duck!' Terry had to admit he hadn't met any of them.

'See,' Terry's dad said proudly. 'All the stars. Travels all over the world, he does.' His smile didn't falter until they were outside the pub. 'You don't eat,' the old man said. 'You don't sleep. And you're skin and bone. What's wrong with you? What's going on?'

Terry said nothing, filling himself with the chilled night air, glad to be out of the pub and away from the smell of cooked meat.

His father picked up the handles of a two-wheeled cart, and began pulling it behind him. They walked back into the great freezing cavern of a market, where the old man rested his rickshaw.

'Your mum liked that girl. Young Misty. Serious about her, are you?'

Terry looked away. 'Not really.' How could he tell the old man about Dag Wood? How could he tell him any of that?

His father shook his head, eyes blazing. He had never raised a hand to Terry in his life. But he had a way of looking at his son that hurt as much as any slap. 'One of these days we're going to find out what you do like, Tel,' he said. Terry knew that the life he was leading was unimaginable to his father. But the old man was not stupid - he knew that whatever his son was doing, he couldn't go on doing it for ever. Without being asked, Terry's dad produced a worn-out wallet from his back pocket, and started peeling off the notes.

'Twenty-five quid do it?' This said without a hint of reproach. 'It's the best I can do until Friday.' Terry hung his head. 'Dad, I'm sorry - I'll pay you back.'

Terry's father stuffed the money into his son's hand and dragged his cart over to a line of showers. WASH ALL TRUCKS HERE, said the sign.

'I don't care, I'd give you the shirt off my back,' Terry's father said. He began hosing down the rickshaw. Blood streamed in the gutter. 'But you can't even eat.' 'Help you with that, Dad? Help you with that?'

But Terry's old man shook his head, and continued hosing down what the porters in Smithfield called a truck, and he wouldn't even look at his son. ** x-

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Mrs Brown swung the canary yellow Lotus Elan left at Marble Arch and gunned it down Park Lane, hitting the brakes as they passed the Dorchester and then the Hilton. Ray scanned the big hotels for packs of photographers. But the only sign of life was a lonely doorman in a top hat. Ray nervously rubbed his bare wrist.

'Do you want to try the Ritz?' she said, hitting the floor. She was a good driver, and the Elan just flew, and when she put the pedal to the floor, Ray thought it felt like some new kind of drug. 'Where's the Ritz?' he said.

She looked at him to see if he was joking. Then she said, 'The Ritz is on Piccadilly, just round the corner from Park Lane, he might be there. Or the Savoy, down by the river. Or Claridges -that's probably even more likely. They're all pretty close.' 'I know Claridges,' Ray said. 'I know that one.'

She chuckled. 'Yeah, what did you do at Claridges? Have tea and buttered scones?' 'No,' Ray said. 'I interviewed Bob Dylan.'

She raised her meticulously plucked eyebrows. She was impressed, he could see that. People were always impressed when they heard who he had met, although Ray couldn't understand why. It wasn't as though genius was contagious. And he had hardly got a coherent sentence out of Dylan - Ray had been sick with nerves, and Dylan had been monosyllabic. This beardy, middle-aged guy who clearly wanted to be somewhere else.

White had stuck it on the cover, because Acid Pete had a good concert shot, and because Dylan still warranted a cover. But it had been a crap piece. People thought they would be changed if they could just breathe the same air as the biggest stars. Ray knew it didn't work out like that. John Lennon wasn't going to save him. John Lennon wasn't going to save anyone.

'Well,' she said. 'If you interviewed Dylan, you shouldn't have any problem with John Lennon.'

'That was different,' Ray said. 'It was all set up for me. It's not so easy when you have to do it alone.' 'Ah,' she said. 'You're not alone.'

They smiled at each other. It was true. She had been a big help. If he had tramped around the five-star hotels by himself, John Lennon would have been at Heathrow before Ray had seen half of them. But as she expertly threw the Lotus around the empty West End streets, Ray felt a creeping despair. This was never going to work. Who was he kidding? He had never been a real journalist, just another kid who loved music.

'Anyway,' she said, when they had driven by the deserted entrance of the last hotel, 'the Beades were thugs pretending to be gentlemen, and the Stones were gentlemen pretending to be thugs.' She got this funny smile, and looked at Ray sideways. 'Did you know I had a thing with Brian? I was just a kid. Did my husband ever tell you that?'

'Brian Jones?' Ray said. He was dumbfounded. Beautiful Brian, playing his sitar. Beautiful Brian, floating dead in his swimming pool. He was a part of history. Now Ray was impressed. It was like hearing that she had slept with Napoleon.

'Met him at that club where they started - the Station I loirl She laughed softly at the memory. The Elan was Hying the oil in way up Park Lane. She seemed to like this road. She could really get up some speed. 'The Station Hotel, Kew Road, Richmond. Sunday nights. Back in 1963.1 was - what? Fourteen! He had lots of girls, of course. My husband never mentioned it to you? It drove him crazy for years. The thought of me with Brian.'

Ray shook his head. 'Your husband never mentioned you to me.' He tried to soften the words. 'I mean, all we ever really talked about was his band and how they were doing. He didn't really talk about you.' She laughed sourly.

'Of course not. When the sexual jealousy wears off, a woman knows she's on her way out. The next thing you know, they're giving you sex aids for your birthday.' She said these things and he didn't know how to respond. He

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was aware that Mrs Brown wasn't asking for his opinion. So Ray said nothing. Then she sighed, as if she had had enough for one night.

'I can drop you home, if you like. Where do you live? Do you share a flat?' Ray shook his head. 'I might just wander about for a bit.' She pulled a face. 'Not in a squat, are you?'

Ray looked embarrassed. 'I'm still living at my mum and dad's place. At least, I was until I left home.' 'When was that?' 'About two hours ago.'

She laughed, and Ray realised how much he liked her. Under all that hardened frost, she was lovely. It all got mixed up for Ray -her kindness in helping him look for Lennon, the way her face lit up when she laughed, and the feeling of driving through London in the middle of the night in a yellow Lotus Elan. He didn't want to be walking the streets alone.

'Then I guess we are going to have to go back to my place,' she said. In the moonlight the squat reared above them like a derelict Xanadu. There had been wealth here once, years ago, but now the facade of the great white house was scarred with gaping black cracks. Lights flickered in the bare upper windows - candles, open fires, the fiery glow of a bar on an electric heater. A baby was crying. 'Who lives here?' Ruby said. 'Dossers?'

'They're not dossers,' Leon said, counting out his change to pay the taxi driver. 'They're homeless. Can you help me out here? I'm a bit short. Sorry.' Ruby frowned at him. 'Girls don't pay. Boys pay.' She sighed. 'How's fifty pence?'

There was a phrase he remembered from somewhere - something about new strategies needing to be devised to bring the wage of the female workforce in line with that of their male counterparts. But he couldn't keep this girl in his life by parroting stuff he had read in books. After Evelyn 'Champagne' King, that wasn't enough. So instead he said, 'Fifty pence would be brilliant. I've got the tip.'

She pulled out her purse and counted out the rest of the fare. Leon found a Luncheon Voucher in the sticky bottom of a pocket in his Lewis Leather, and slapped it on the driver's palm. The taxi driver shook his head. 'Bleedin' gypos,' he said, and drove away.

Ruby was reading the graffiti. 'Cats like plain crisps.,,. No drugs in here… pull the other one.'

'No, it's true,' Leon said. 'The people who run this place don't believe in drugs. People take drugs to make themselves free. And we think that - you know…' He felt embarrassed talking to her this way. 'We're all free already, I guess.' 'But you were taking drugs.'

'That's because I was with my friend. He thinks he needs them.' He smiled at her in the moonlight. And he sometimes leads me astray' She smiled back. 'Easily led astray, are you?' Leon took out his key. 'Sometimes. How about you?'

She shook her head. 'My dad would kill me.' She looked up at the squat. 'Steve would kill me.' 'Then it's lucky Steve's not here, isn't it?'

Ruby looked back at him, not smiling now. 'Lucky for both of us.'

She held on to the back of his leather jacket as they negotiated their way across the planks. Leon let them into the darkened hallway and Ruby immediately smashed her shin against a bicycle. 'Careful,' Leon said. 'There's light upstairs. Sorry.'

Shadowy faces appeared on the first-floor landing, and then were gone. Leon and Ruby climbed the stairs. In the main room candlelight and bare bulbs lit a circle of young men sitting

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cross-legged on the floorboards. They glanced at Leon and Ruby, nodded, and went back to their council. Voices murmured in the tongues of northern Europe.

'There are some people here who were in Paris,' Leon said. 'Paris in '68.' 'I went to Calais once,' Ruby said. "With the school.'

They moved through the house. There was almost no furniture. You could smell mildewed wood and unwashed bodies and something cooking. 'It don't half pong,' Ruby whispered.

Faces peered out of the darkness, suspicious at first and then accepting and friendly, in a vague, unfocused sort of way. Leon felt Ruby relax. This wasn't such a bad place to be. They passed through a small kitchen where a huge pot of soup was simmering on a grease-encrusted cooker. Unwashed cutlery and scraps of food were scattered around. A longhaired young woman was washing a naked baby in a plastic bowl in the sink.

They went into the unlit bedroom where his father had stood. There had been new arrivals. Rucksacks were spilling their contents and half a dozen sleeping bags covered the floor. Most of them were occupied. A couple were making grunty love, the floorboards creaking beneath them. Ruby took Leon's arm and pulled him outside, giggling. 'They don't mind,' Leon said. 'I mind,' she said.

She shook her head and led him back to the kitchen. The woman and her baby were gone. Ruby made him sit in the only chair. She looked around for a moment, located half a lemon, a bottle of bleach and a teacup celebrating the wedding of Princess Anne and Mark Phillips. Then she faced Leon. She was very serious. She had her professional mask on.

She pulled off his hat, helped him out of his Lewis Leather, and then finally pulled his old Thin Lizzy T-shirt over his head. He made a movement towards her but she shook her head, no, that wasn't what she wanted, at least not now, and got him to position his chair in front of the sink. He stared at himself in a cracked mirror.

Leon kept watching his reflection as Ruby washed his hair with cold water and hand soap, then squeezed the juice of half a lemon on it, and finally rinsed it with the Anne and Mark teacup containing a spoonful of bleach, more cold water and the remains of the lemon.

Leon watched his reflection as Ruby turned him into a blond, and he watched her face in the cracked mirror as she performed this magic.

For the first time in his life, Leon felt like he was possibly good looking, although he knew this had less to do with the changing colour of his hair than the feel of her fingers massaging his scalp, and her face considering his head with total concentration, and the warmth of her breath on the back of his neck.

He felt like she really cared about him, and his heart did somersaults.

Later, when the foreign voices in the big room had stopped, and the couple making grunty love were snoring, Leon and Ruby crawled into his sleeping bag.

Then Leon and Ruby made love as close to silence as they could, the only sounds their breathing and the bare floorboards beneath them and his delirious, babbled whisper.

'I love you,' he moaned, his eyes filling up at the terrible truth of it. 'Oh, I love you so much!'

Ruby giggled beneath him, and then sighed, and held him, and drove him wild. Leon came a bucket. How many nights without sleep?

Almost three, Terry thought, the darkness of Covent Garden all around. When morning came it would be three full nights without sleep.

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He counted them off.

The last two nights in Berlin. One spent running round the backstreets of the city with Dag, watching him and the band borrow instruments from a beardy jazz quartet, banging out a ramshackle version of his greatest hits, Dag throwing himself around like a lunatic, at one point swinging from a lampshade and doing a belly flop on a table of middle-aged jazz fans.

And then the next night locked up in Dag's hotel room, doing Christa's coke, talking until the maid was banging on the door because she needed to service the room and it was time for Terry to wipe his nose, pack his bags and catch a cab to the airport.

And now this night, this dying night, with only hours before it was gone. That would be the three nights without sleep, the killer three nights in a row, and Terry knew too well what always happened on the third morning. On the third morning you started seeing things.

It could be anything. After three nights without sleep, Terry had once seen a sparrow jiving. After a different three nights he had seen a crashed plane, a jumbo jet peeled open like a can of sardines, tilted on its side outside his bedsit. Mad stuff. Insane stuff. The jiving sparrow, the crashed plane - they weren't there -Terry knew that, and he tried to hold on to that knowledge. But it was hard.

After three nights, the speed in your liver turned to mescaline -a hallucinogenic - and you saw visions and they seemed so real. You swallowed your terror, and you tried to tear your eyes away, because you couldn't help believe in them. After three nights without going to bed, it seemed so real.

And as Terry saw the lights of the Western World coming out of the blackness, he wondered what slice of madness he would have to see tonight. In the hours since he had left the Western World, the club had gone berserk. Stark raving berserk. It was as if all the psychosis and frustration and violence that had been storing up in the Vortex and the Marquee and the Roxy and the Red Cow and the Nashville and Dingwalls and the Hope amp; Anchor had descended on this hole in the ground in Covent Garden.

Terry fought his way downstairs and saw that there were Dagenham Dogs everywhere.

They had annexed the dance floor. Smashing into each other, lobbing cans and spit at the stage, shoving aside anyone who didn't belong to their little tribe, taking over the place and loving it. Terry thought about Leon and hoped his friend was far away from here.

There was a Union Jack jacket right in the middle of the mayhem. Brainiac was out there with the Dogs, doing his mad piston dance, like a cross between a mascot and a punch bag, and Dogs twice his size pummelled into him, knocking him back and forth like a red, white and blue shuttlecock.

Brainiac saw Terry and grinned his dopey grin, as if they were all pals together, but Terry couldn't manage to smile back.

He thought there was a good chance the Dogs were going to do the thing that they had threatened all year. They were finally going to go all the way and kill someone.

Terry pushed his way upstairs to the toilets. It was tough moving around this place tonight. No one gave way. Strangers scowled and snarled at him. There seemed to be more and more faces that he didn't recognise, and he felt like fucking crying.

It's just the speed, he thought. It's just the three nights and the speed and the fear of what I will see.

He entered the men's toilets. Dub reggae shuddered the splintered white tiles and fractured mirrors. The toilet was crowded with men and women and boys and girls taking drugs, selling drugs and applying dollops of make-up. Nobody was using the place for its intended purpose, but somehow it still managed to stink with the trapped excretions of a thousand and one nights. Terry found the bespectacled longhair he was looking for,

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hawking his gram and half-gram bags from a toilet stall. The dealer. By his side was a hippy chick with a paralysed smile. His burnt-out girlfriend. They all nodded in recognition and Terry forced a smile, slipping into the etiquette of scoring, which mostly meant looking interested while the dealer jabbered about whatever scrap of lunacy was floating around his badly fried brain.

'Terry - I was just saying - you have to live on a boat, right?' the dealer said, his bright eyes gleaming behind thick glasses. 'Because - if you live on a boat - right? - they can't trace you -you're not on the electoral, you know, roll call. The register. Registrar. Hmm?'

The dealer cackled at his cunning plan to outwit the authorities. He had been selling his wares out of the lavatories of various music venues for ten years, but suddenly he had this burning need to explain his retirement plans to Terry.

'And, like, no Rates,' smiled his dazed-looking girlfriend. 'No Rates on a, like, boat.' 'So you save money right there,' cackled the dealer. The babble, thought Terry.

The babble and the prattle and the bullshit that a man has to listen to, just to buy some drugs. Terry wanted to be out of there, but the politesse of scoring obliged him to listen to a speech of speed-addled insanity. The dub thundered on, and Terry felt his brain begin to swell.

'It's a good idea,' Terry said, watching Warwick Hunt walk into the toilet. 'Live on a fishing boat.'

With a flicker of contempt, Terry saw that the A amp;R man was the only fat person in the Western World - all those expense-account lunches and flying first class to LA, New York and Tokyo. All those perks of the job.

The man who had been responsible for signing some of the biggest bands of the last ten years looked like the brother of someone who was in ELO. He took a fastidious pee at a cracked urinal, zipped up his pressed Levi's and looked around for some kind of personal-hygiene facilities. Terry smiled grimly. Where did he think he was? The fucking Marquee? In the Western World, all the sinks were smashed and the water had been turned off long ago. Sighing with irritation, Warwick Hunt removed a small silver snuffbox from his short leather Budgie jacket, snapped it open and dipped in the silver spoon that he wore on a chain around his hairy neck.

'You got to get a fishing boat, man,' said the dealer. 'You have to get a bo-bo-boat.'

At moments of great excitement the dealer developed a high-pitched stutter.

'Makes sense to me,' Terry said, wondering if every drug salesman inevitably sampled too much of his own stock.

He was distracted. A small adoring crowd had already gathered around Warwick Hunt. Hunt may have been the only man in there with love handles and a mullet and glasses that had smoky lenses, but he had the power to make dreams come true. A girl with a ring through her nose and a nappy worn over ripped black tights was giving him a cassette that Terry knew with total certainty must contain her band's demos. Warwick Hunt smiled patiently, enjoying himself now he had the world at his feet and the coke up his nose. Nothing has changed, Terry thought. We thought that everything would change, but it's the same old rock-and-roll showbiz.

'You don't - you don't - you don't,' said the dealer, 'you don't buy fish that swim in filthy water - do you, hmm?'

Terry nodded emphatically, and he was rewarded with two fat little bags of amphetamine sulphate. At last. Two grams for Ј24. As the notes his dad had given him slipped into the dealer's pocket, an image of his father came to Terry's mind. The old man staggering across a frozen landscape, his legs buckling beneath him, and carrying his only son on his weary back.

Billy Blitzen swaggered in and a jolt of electricity ran through the toilet. He ignored Warwick Hunt, who watched him with an

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ingratiating grin, then came over to Terry and smiled. Billy had a way of smiling that made you feel like you were the most important person in the world.

'Hey, man,' Billy said in his soulful murmur. Then he turned to the dealer, and his voice became brisk and businesslike. 'I'll take a G of your good stuff.'

The dealer held up his hands, as if surrendering. He looked embarrassed.

'As soon as you pay me for the last time,' he said, his grin so fixed it seemed nailed in place. 'And the time before that.' Trying to turn it into a joke now. 'And the t-t-time before that.' Billy Blitzen's handsome face clouded with fury.

'You fucking drug-dealing scuzzball - you talk to me like that in front of my friend?'

There were tears of rage in Billy's eyes. The dealer raised his hands higher, saying they could possibly come to some arrangement, but it was too late. Til tan your queer limey ass!' Billy thundered.

Terry watched his dapper little friend unbuckle the elaborate cowboy belt that was holding up the trousers of his destroyed Italian suit. The dealer cowered back into the toilet stall, hiding behind his girlfriend, as Billy lashed the belt at thin air.

Terry wrapped his arms around Billy and dragged him away. The crowd parted for them as Terry pulled his friend from the toilet. It was surprisingly easy. Billy weighed next to nothing, and Terry felt some unnameable grief well up inside him. He thought - what's going to happen to us all?

Terry put his arm around Billy and led him to the club's tiny dressing room. Terry was always shocked at the size of the place. Legends had begun here, but it was just a broom cupboard with a bench on one side, the walls covered from ceiling to floor with posters of countless bands, and a layer of graffiti on top of that. Terry sat Billy down. The P45s were shuffling around, drinking beer and tuning up for the show. They regarded their leader with supreme indifference. 'Now are you going to be okay?' Terry asked.

He had never seen Billy so far gone. His mouth gaped, the lids of those huge brown eyes seemed too heavy to stay open, and in the yellow light of the dressing room the suit was stained and frayed. 'Just need a little lift,' Billy Blitzen said.

A tall man with cropped hair stuck his head around the door. 'Showtime,' he said.

Suddenly Billy seemed aware of the moment, and his eyes opened wide.

'Big gig tonight, man. That guy's here. That guy from the record company.'

Terry stuck his hand in his jacket, palmed one of the bags of sulphate and clutched hands with Billy. He knew that Billy wouldn't want to share any of this with his backing band. When his friend took a peek at what he had in his hand his face lit up with a smile.

Terry would do a lot for one of those smiles. Because Hilly Blitzen had been in a band he loved. And because he had more natural charm than anyone Terry had ever met.

'My buddy,' Billy Blitzen said, patting Terry's face, and Terry felt this strange brew of pride and sorrow. 'Just go easy on it, okay? His stuff is pretty pure.'

Billy pulled a face. 'That scuzzball. That fucking scuzzball. Talking to me about money.'

The P45s had strapped on their guitars and were heading put of the dressing room.

'Just have a good show,' Terry said, pulling Billy Blitzen to his feet. He watched him strap on his guitar and start to turn into someone else. 'The shows are all good,' Billy said. 'Ain't they?'

Terry nodded, and laughed, and felt himself fill with feelings that he couldn't blame on the speed or the three nights.

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It was true. The shows were all good. It was always worth watching Billy Blitzen. You never knew when it would be the last time. In the shadows at the back of the Western World, Terry climbed on a chair to watch the show.

He took out his remaining gram, untied it and dipped in his key. He had always loved watching Billy Blitzen through the alert reverie of amphetamines. The Dean Martin of rock and roll in front of you, and the man-made euphoria pumping through your veins - it was Terry's idea of happiness.

But as he stared out across the terrified spaces opening up around the Dogs, and he felt the days and nights without rest pressing down on him, it was impossible to feel anything but a kind of exhausted melancholy.

Tonight didn't feel the same. Tonight everything was falling apart. It had begun with Misty, and he could feel it spreading to every corner of his life. Everything he loved was slipping away from him.

Billy and the P45s filed on stage, plugged in and contemplated the teeming madness before them. Billy's trousers seemed to be falling down. Terry saw that Billy had neglected to put his cowboy belt back on.

Then Billy was counting them in - one! two! three! four! - and they tore into their signature tune, 'Shoot Up, Everybody'. Almost immediately things started to go wrong, and Terry thought of the older guys at The Paper, and what they said about seeing Jimi Hendrix at the Isle of Wight, how it was like watching someone you loved dying right in front of your eyes.

Billy forgot the words to 'Shoot Up, Everybody', and filled the gaps with obscenities about the Dogs who were spitting their beer at him. Then he mimed jamming a syringe into his arm and somehow the gesture suddenly seemed pathetic instead of thrilling. Under the stark stage light, Billy Blitzen's face no longer seemed rakishly handsome. Even in the heat of the club near closing time, Terry felt a chill run down his spine. Billy looked like he belonged in a morgue.

And Terry remembered something that his dad had told him about the real Dean Martin - how it was all an act. Dino just pretended to be loaded on stage because he knew Mr and Mrs Suburbia lapped it up, just as their grandchildren loved seeing Billy Blitzen play at rock-and-roll suicide. But Dean Martin was always in control and it wasn't like that with Billy Blitzen.

This was the real thing, and Terry felt like a ghoul for watching it.

He saw Billy attempt to duck walk, trip over a cable and almost fall flat on his face. And he had to look away. Everything was collapsing. But the P45s, those wizened old musos, were holding it down, slashing out those shoplifted Eddie Cochran riffs, and the crowd was going out of its collective box.

Even the spaces around the Dagenham Dogs seemed to have closed up. Terry looked back at the stage. Maybe it would be enough for Warwick Hunt and his team of rock-and-roll bean counters.

You never knew, Terry thought. Even when bands were- good, you never knew. You never knew if it was all going to melt away, and they were going to have to find real jobs, or if you would one day see them walking through Soho, unsmiling and proud, all new clothes, thinking about getting their teeth done, veterans of the Top of the Pops green room, treating the record company advance like spending money they would never have to return.

And even as he watched Billy Blitzen struggling to remember the words of songs he had played a thousand times, and even as Billy fought to keep his balance, Terry believed that there was still a possibility that his friend could survive this night, and pull himself together, and record an album that went triple platinum. As he led the P45s through a ferocious rendition of'Summertime Blues', Terry thought that maybe it wasn't too late for Billy Blitzen after all. Then why did Terry still feel so bad? Because something had spoiled.

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He bleakly watched the crowd going mental in front of the stage, raining spit and beer down on his friend, and it felt like a private party had been thrown open to the public and they didn't know how to behave. The days of walking in off the street and paying seventy-five pence to see an unsigned band who would turn out to be the Clash, or the Jam, or the Buzzcocks were passing. Billy Blitzen, he could see, had peaked with the Lost Boys. Peaked when he was nineteen years old.

Terry caught sight of Grace Fury across the crowded floor, imperious and unsmiling among the mayhem. She had her back to the stage, trying to move through the bouncing mob, and she looked up at Terry and smiled with what seemed like real pleasure. A friendly face, he thought. He knew how good that felt.

Then she suddenly turned angrily on a leering Dagenham Dog who had decided to stick his tongue in her ear. Terry saw with a shudder that it was Junior, the wolfish grin on his face out of kilter with his three-teardrop tattoo. It looked like a tribal scar under the lights. Grace lifted a contemptuous middle finger. Junior and the Dogs howled with delight. Terry looked back at the stage where Billy had stopped the music and was lecturing the crowd about spitting.

'Stop gobbing you motherfucking wankers,' he slurred, and Terry felt a pang of affection. Nobody mixed up New York and London swear words quite like Billy Blitzen.

'Where's the girlfriend?' said a voice level with Terry's groin. He looked down at Grace Fury. You could tell why men were crazy for her. Even in this madhouse she looked like sex in a tartan mini-skirt. 'There's no more girlfriend,' Terry said.

There was something about Grace that he had always liked -he didn't feel the need to be cocky with her. Maybe because he thought he would never have a chance with her. Maybe because he thought that she was way out of his league. She was famous. She held up her hands and he helped her climb on to the chair. They stood facing each other, still holding hands. Like kids in Happy Days, he thought.

'Went off with Dag, didn't she?' Grace said, and he looked over her shoulder at the stage, his face burning with humiliation. Grace shook her head.

'Misty - fucking Misty - she really makes me laugh. Goody-two-shoes in her white frocks. Miss-butter-wouldn't-melt. Then she does that to you,' Grace said, turning around so she could watch Billy throwing beer at the crowd. She pitched forward and Terry caught her, slipping his hands around her waist.

He left them there, like a pillion rider on a motorbike,, and he felt himself getting hard. Her waist was nothing, his hands almost encircled it. Her skirt was the shortest he had ever seen. And he admired her - she was a tough girl from New York City who dared to walk through the Dagenham Dogs dressed like that. 'What do you think?' she said. Terry was lost for words.

He felt Grace's palm rubbing the front of his trousers. 'About Billy, I mean,' she laughed. 'Has he blown it?' She took her hand away. Terry took another breath.

'The guy's still watching,' he said, indicating the mullet head of Warwick Hunt that clung to the perimeters of the crowd. 'Billy's smashed out of his box, but maybe he's doing enough.'

She half-turned her head. A hand on his face. He liked the way she touched him. Just a touch and it got him bone hard.

'You scored, didn't you?' she said, and he nodded. Her eyes half closed. Grace was a girl who loved her drugs. 'Then let's get out of here,' she said.

He watched Warwick Hunt turn away, having seen enough, and he knew there would be no happy ending for Billy Blitzen.

'There's too many outsiders,' Grace said, facing the stage again but reaching around to give his buttocks a friendly squeeze. 'If I'd wanted beer-swilling jerk-offs, I'd have stayed in New Jersey.' The band abruptly stopped. Billy was angrily pointing at

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someone in the audience, screaming at them to stop throwing things. It was a perfect cue for glasses, cans and chairs to rain down on stage.

Billy picked up a pint glass resting on an amp and threw it with all his remaining strength into the crowd. Terry watched it sail through the air and strike Warwick Hunt on the side of the head. He collapsed in a shower of blood and broken glass. The cans and bottles rained down like arrows at Agincourt. Billy Blitzen and the P45s fled the stage. 'Yeah, let's go,' Terry said. 'This is so fucked.'

They were meant to be breaking down the barriers between performers and the audience. They were meant to be different to other generations.

And it was true in the early days - there had been a kind of wanton democracy about the Western World. But rebellion had become the excuse to act like a cretin. He used to love this place. Now what he had loved was gone. He wanted to get away, and he wanted to take this incredible girl with him.

He jumped down off the chair. She jumped down after him and fell into his arms, the red slash of her lips on his mouth, and he was hungry for her, but then she was pulling away, laughing, saying, 'Take it easy, tiger.'

He took her hand and she followed him, smiling, looking sexy and coy all at once, and he thought about Misty in somebody's room, he thought about Sally and the chance he had missed, but here he was going home with the girl of the moment, here he was about to make love to one of those women that men fantasised about, and Terry felt like the world would be made good again once he had this woman in his bed. But first he had to see his friend.

Billy was slumped in the dressing room, his nose buried deep in the bag of speed. He came up looking like Frosty the Snowman. The P45s were bruised and angry and arguing with the manager about money. Billy was beyond caring. He licked the white powder from his lips and chin.

'My man,' he laughed, seeing Terry, then his eyes were rolling back into his head and he began tearing at his suit, his shirt, his skinny tie. Suddenly his clothes seemed to be suffocating him. 'My London mate.' 'Jesus Christ,' Grace said, looking away.

And Terry saw that it was always going to be this way. Billy Blitzen had that New York thing, and if you meant it - that New York thing - if you truly meant it, then you didn't sign with Warwick Hunt and go off to record an album with Phil Spector in Nassau.

If you meant it, if you really meant it, then you destroyed yourself. You died, Terry thought, and a great sob rose up inside him.

All those Billy Blitzen songs that they had loved at the Western World - Terry saw now that they were all suicide notes, and it broke his heart.

'Got to do one more set… maybe you review… fuck that Warwick Hunt… then we party.'

One of the P45s, the drummer who had throttled Brainiac earlier that night, light years ago, abruptly turned on his leader. Terry could see that beyond the dye job and the zippy clothes, he was really old.

'Party's over, you fucking dickhead,' he shouted in Billy's befuddled face.

Terry took two steps across the dressing room and shoved the drummer against the wall.

'Leave him alone, you bastard,' Terry said, then he was with his friend on the bench, his arm around his skinny shoulders, a cloud of white dust between them.

T got to go, Billy,' Terry said, and he hated to see the look in I hose eyes, and when he thought about that night years later, when the news of Billy Blitzen's death had just come through, Terry thought that of all the betrayals of that night, deserting

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Billy Blitzen in the dressing room of the Western World was the worst.

'Let's go, Terry,' Grace said, and so they did, leaving the Western World with their arms wrapped around each other. There was a strange sound in the air and for a long second Terry couldn't work out what it was. And then he realised. There was no music. Nobody on stage, the dub all gone. The music had stopped.

Grace expressed no surprise at the car that Terry had parked nearby. These Americans, he thought. A Ford Capri is nothing to them. Ray slid out of bed, looking for the bathroom, and everything seemed new.

There was an egg-shaped lamp on a coffee table big enough for ping-pong. Never seen one of those before, thought Ray. There were silver ashtrays as big as dog bowls. That's new. Gold records in glass frames. Only seen those on the walls of the record labels, never in someone's home. Long, low furniture still in plastic covers like giant condoms. What's all that about? A bookshelf with a wooden ladder, believe it or not, the books curiously uniform, their spines unbroken, as though they had been bought by the yard. Well, I'll be blowed, thought Ray. And a married woman warm beneath the sheets. That was the newest thing of all.