Stories we could tell

There had been girls. There had been lots of girls. Because they liked him - and men too, he knew that, although that had never been his thing. And because he had started young, a fifteen-year-old virgin who only cared about music when White first gave him a gig on The Paper. But there had never been a married woman before, and the thought excited and frightened him.

Where was the manager of one of the biggest bands in the world? Where was her husband tonight? Where was that vibrator-buying bastard? And what would he do to Ray if he found him here? Ray moved through the house, aware of his nakedness, alert to every noise, but still with the space to be dead impressed. He had never seen such luxury.

He padded across the living room, his bare feet sinking into the shag carpet, and beyond the wall-to-floor windows he could hear the gentle flow of the river.

It was hard to imagine that this was the same river that ran by their office, the timeless river where they smoked their mid-morning spliffs in the shadow of a tower block and the tugs chugged by the sad, dying docks.

This was the suburban Thames, the river that ran past the huge houses of men who had made their money, bought their mansions to store their gold records and their bored, ignored wives. Like the one Ray could smell on half a dozen places of his sticky skin.

She was bossy, Ray thought with a smile. Bossy but nice. 'Don't make love to me,' she had told him, not that impressed by his leisurely technique. 'Don't make love to me - fuck me.'

The things she said! But he liked it. He liked her. A lot of the sex he had had felt mechanical. As though the girl you were with could have been doing it with anyone. But Mrs Brown cared. Ray felt like it meant something to her. And he didn't mind being told what to do. He wanted to learn.

He located the bathroom and spent a while gawping at all the bottles of perfume. How could anyone ever get through all that stuff? And that's when he heard the noise.

Holding his breath, Ray wrapped a white towel around his waist and stepped outside. A strange, shorthaired cat rubbed against his bare leg and he gasped with fright. Then he heard her call his name.

Back in the bedroom, her mouth wandered across his face as though she could never get enough of it, her hands pulled him down, and they both laughed with delight that they still wanted more, and then they rocked on the waterbed, their skin slick with their exertions, hair in their faces, her long dark hair and his long

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fair hair mingling. Doing it on a waterbed, Ray thought proudly. That's new. He couldn't believe his luck.

Then Ray must have fallen asleep because he found himself coming awake with a start, and knowing he had to go, as much as he hated the idea. Somehow sex with her had convinced him that he could find John Lennon. Sex with her made him feel like he could do anything. And as he pulled on his pants, he thought for the first time how great it would be to live with her.

She sat up, resting on an elbow, then sunk a little. He smiled at her. It wasn't easy sitting up on a waterbed.

'Oh, don't go,' she said, her voice husky in the darkness, losing that hardness he had noticed in the Speak. 'Stay the night. He's not coming back tonight.'

Ray pulled on his Levi's. 'It's not that. I've got to do this interview. Or I'm out.' Silence for a moment. 'If you liked me, you'd stay.'

He laughed. 'Of course I like you.' He got back on the bed so he could see her face. And so she could see his face. 'I'm mad about you.' She pouted, looked unconvinced. He got up, pulled on his T-shirt. 'I've been thinking about it - you're not happy here, are you? It's a terrific place, but it doesn't make you happy' He worked up the nerve to say it. 'So maybe we should find somewhere. To live. You and me.'

She laughed at that and he was stung. 'What we going to do?' she said, and some of the old hardness crept back. 'Live with your parents?'

He shrugged. He hadn't really thought about that part. 'Get a flat somewhere. A room.'

'A room? What - like a bedsit?' She rummaged in the bedside table, then there was the flare of a match and a cigarette's glow. 'You really don't have a clue, do you?'

Ray pulled on his boots. It was true. He didn't have a job, he didn't have a flat, and he didn't have a clue. 'No, I guess not.'

But the thought gnawed at him - how great it would be to be with her every night. Yes, she was married. But she didn't love her husband. And he didn't love her. Anyone who could give you a vibrator for your birthday didn't have a shred of love in their heart. So what was keeping her here? Just all this… stuff? Was that what happened when you got old? You developed this desperate need for stuff? But he knew she was angry with him for going, and so he said nothing.

He sat on the bed, his bottom swaying on the waterbed as he pulled on his cowboy boots. She sighed, sitting up in bed, her small breasts uncovered, and then there was a faint jingle and the phone was on her lap, and she was dialling a number she knew by heart. And suddenly he was angry with her. For not wanting to live with him. For needing all this fucking stuff. For getting on the phone before he was even out of the bedroom.

'It's me,' she said, and she used that voice she had used with him. Ray watched her, his face a mask. He shut down. That's what he did. He knew people his age flew off the handle. But not him. He found it easier to show them nothing. 'No, I don't - I'm not wearing a watch,' she laughed into the receiver, her eyes flicking on to Ray's face and then away. 'What? Nothing, actually, nothing at all' Ray walked to the bedroom door, and he felt her watching him. He wasn't going to cry in front of her. 'So why don't you come over?' she said. 'Yes - now.' Laughter in the dark. 'Come on -you know you want to…'

Ray watched her from the doorway, touched his hand to his lips and let it fall away, a sad little wave. His fingers were still sticky. He could still taste her.

'Yeah - no - well,' she was saying, 'that's what you get from the likes of her, I'm afraid.'

Ray let himself out of the house, quietly closing the front door behind him, so he didn't see the expression on her face change. 'Listen,' Mrs Brown said when she heard that he was gone. 'Listen - I tell you what - I'll call you next week, okay? It's late now. I tell you what. I think I'll just sleep.'

***

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He stood by the road that led back to London, holding out his thumb for an approaching lorry. It didn't even slow down.

A police car cruised by, checking him out, the two cops grinning at him - a harmless hippy who missed the last train - before moving on. Then nothing, just the mist on the river, and everyone in their beds, and his eyes scanning the sky for the first light of dawn.

A sports car came by. A yellow Lotus Elan. She threw open the passenger door.

'I'm not sleepy anyway,' she said. He'd never seen her looking shy before. He smiled at her, and it felt like his face would ache with the smiling.

She hit the floor and they sped away from the suburbs, and when she had nothing but the open road to the city ahead, she rolled down the window and threw out something stuffed inside a bag from Harlequin Records. Ray didn't have to ask. He knew it was the birthday present. Terry's bedsit wasn't much.

A mattress shoved up against a crumbling bay window where the rain came in, a two-bar electric heater and records everywhere, and on the wall the classic poster of Enter the Dragon, Bruce Lee naked to the waist, holding up his Nanchuks, everything about him perfect, even the claw marks on his face and torso.

The roadie upstairs was playing Motorhead at top volume -something he always did when his girlfriend went home to her mother. The carpet was stained with the memory of a hundred residents. There was a pile of white towelling bathrobes in one corner that said Glasgow Hilton, Newcastle Holiday Inn and Leeds Dragonara. And Misty's stuff scattered around - the dresses, the piles of photographic books, the rolls of film and contact sheets, her change of boots. A room untouched by domesticity.

But Grace was a rock and roller. She had worn her torn stockings on the Lower East Side, and given a middle finger to the Bowery bums who had something to say. She was used to squalor. He pulled her skirt up around her waist, their tongues wrestling, his desperate hands wanting to be everywhere at once. 'You got the stuff?' she said.

He nodded, found his mirror with the razor blade and pulled out his stash. Grace sat on the bed, crossing her legs, and he had to tear his eyes away to concentrate on chopping out the lines. His heart thumped with anticipation. Terry was minutes away from the fuck of a lifetime. Grace lay back on the bed. The razor blade frantically chopped out the four lines of sulphate.

The nice thing about the room was that you couldn't see it very well. It was lit by a bare, dusty 40-watt bulb, the fiery glow of the electric heater, and the fairy lights that Misty had strung around the bedstead when she moved in and never taken down. It was only a Ј6-a-week hovel in Crouch End, rented from a Greek landlord who told Terry that he was moving to Melbourne because England was finished, but those fairy lights made it feel special -like home. Or maybe that was just because Misty had put then) up.

Terry found a red-and-white plastic straw and did two of the lines on the mirror. Then Grace was sitting up, reaching for the mirror and Terry crushed his mouth against her mouth and went down the hall to throw some cold water in his face.

He was excited and nervous, wanting it to go well, wondering about Grace's boyfriend, the singer in her band. Did they sneak around behind each other's backs? Did they have some kind of arrangement? Terry was discovering that there were more shadows between men and women than he had ever imagined. And would she be his girlfriend after tonight? That would show Misty, that would show them all - Grace Fury as his girlfriend. She was the one they all wanted, and the drumbeat in his chest told him that he was about to have her. He threw water on his face and smiled at himself in the bathroom mirror, ready for the one he would never forget.

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She was waiting for him when he went back to the room. She was in the pose that was designed to inflame him, the position that he would have favoured, if there had been any choice in the matter. On the edge of the bed, her clothes off, her legs crossed, leaning back.

But the thing that made Terry's blood freeze was that she was shooting up.

Grace had not hoovered the white lines up her nose as he had expected. She had produced her works - the needle, the belt tied tight around her upper arm - and as he came into the room to see his fantasy made flesh, his dream girl was searching for a vein, then finding it, and gasping - panting - with pleasure at the act of penetration, the spike entering her vein, the cooked-up speed quickly finding her bloodstream.

In a daze, Terry declined the mumbled invitation to join her shooting up, to share the dripping needle, as if he was refusing an extra ginger nut at tea, and he watched her writhing with pleasure - arching her back, closing her eyes, exhaling with a kind of euphoric disbelief - and he knew it was far more pleasure than he could ever give her.

He didn't really want anything after that - not the drugs, not the girl, and certainly not any part of the act before him. Needles scared the shit out of him. But he was young and it was too late to stop and he had always wanted to get the girl that everyone wanted.

So he tore his clothes off and fell upon her on that lumpy mattress in that leaky bedsit, more in desperation than enthusiasm, her thin white body still and doped beneath him, her needle sharing their bed and glinting in the Christmas lights, almost festive. PART THREE:

1977 - LOVERS OF TODAY

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TWELVE

The night was almost over.

From the window of the editor's office, Terry could see the sky above the old dying docks streaking with light. Somewhere a tug made its mournful sound. Twenty-one storeys below, beyond the hermetically sealed, suicide-proof windows, he could see the river black and glittering, most of the city still sleeping, but already there were the lights of the first cars on the Embankment. Not long now.

Terry went back to his office and did a line of speed at his desk. He liked being in White's office, but he didn't want to take drugs in there. It would have felt disrespectful. He rocked in his swivel chair, staring at the images on their three walls. High up on his own wall, Norman Mailer's battered face caught Terry's eye.

He had heard this story about Mailer on the eve of his last wedding, and it had stuck with him. Mailer was depressed about walking down the aisle the next day. His future wife asked him what was wrong, and Mailer said that he had never wanted this -marriage, monogamy, fusing his life with one other life. All Mailer had ever wanted was to be a free man in Paris. And his future wife said - now look, Norman. If you were a free man in Paris you would eventually meet one special girl and end up exactly

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where you are today. And Norman Mailer saw that this was true. And so did Terry. In those brief moments of freedom that came your way, you were always looking for a way to not be free, to belong totally to someone. You went looking for new worlds, and then you found them in just one face. Terry found Misty. Now he had lost her, and now he was free again.

He did another line, and then he got up and wandered through the dark empty rooms of the office, and he was soon rummaging around in the filing cabinets, thumbing through photo files and bound back issues, soaking up the incredible history of the place. Jimmy Savile says 'Hi there' to all readers of The Music Paper and wishes one and all a Merry Xmas and a great 1968 - 'See you in The People every Sunday, guys? girls.'

It was like being locked in a museum after hours, he thought. During the day The Paper was a constant round of work, play and music, of spats, spliffs, and strange new sounds blaring from the review room. Kevin White and the older guys shouting for the dummy. A constant procession of faces old and new - freelancers, musicians, PRs - looking for feature work or publicity, who were often willing to settle for free drugs or lunch or a gig doing 300 words on the Vibrators at Dingwalls.

During the day maybe you would walk into someone's office and there would be Joan Jett sitting on a desk, batting her eyelashes and asking you for a light. Or maybe a couple of writers would be arguing about the merits of a record that came out years ago -on Terry's first day, he had seen two of the older guys almost come to slaps about Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Or maybe some female freelancer and one of the older guys would be having a quick joint, cuddle or debate about the new Steely Dan record in the stationery cupboard. That was the day. But at night everyone was gone. Well, almost everyone.

Terry looked in the window of the review room. Skip Jones was still in there, writing in his agonised, left-handed longhand, surrounded by that strange garden, the small forest of forgotten cigarettes resting on their filter tips, the cones of ash long and wilting but curiously undisturbed. Terry tapped lightly on the glass. Skip looked up, smiled shyly, nodded.

'Terry Warboys, wild,' he said, dog tired now, the night nearly gone, and with hours of writing behind him.

Terry came into the review room. Shy too. Skip Jones still meant so much to him. Because, because - Skip was just the best there had ever been. 'Not going home, Skip?'

Skip shook his head, looking at a point somewhere above Terry's shoulder. It occurred to Terry that Skip had no place to go tonight.

'Might as well stick around,' Skip said. 'It's going to be a busy day.'

Terry nodded. 'Because of Elvis, right? I guess White will want some sort of special for the new issue.' He was shocked to see how pale-faced and frail Skip seemed. But then again, Terry knew he probably didn't look too rosy-cheeked and hearty himself. 'You going to write something about Elvis, Skip?'

Skip shrugged. 'Maybe. Might write something aboul I In-early days at Sun. Sam Phillips and the boy in the red shirt who wanted to record a song for Mama. "Good Rocking Tonight" and dreams of being a truck driver. All that.' Skip smiled at a point above Terry's shoulder. 'Not sure I want to be part of the whole, uh, canonisation process. Not sure it's right. We haven't had a good word to say about Elvis since he went into the army. Now we're going to turn him into -1 don't know what - Lenin's preserved corpse in Red Square or something. Know what I mean?'

Terry nodded, pulling out his Marlboros. He had no fucking idea what Skip meant. Rock stars died and then you loved them more than ever. Brian Jones. Jimi Hendrix. Jim Morrison. That's the way it had always been. But he thought of Billy Blitzen, alone and strung-out in the Western World, and for the first time Terry

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glimpsed something beyond the eternal glory of rock-and-roll martyrdom. He saw the waste.

'Thanks, man,' Skip said as Terry offered him his last cigarette. Skip lit up, dragged deeply and then carefully set the Marlboro on its filter tip, immediately forgetting it. Terry stared at it hungrily. 'Rock and roll is turning into museum culture now,' said Skip. 'Like jazz or painting. You know? The canon exists, and all we can do is stand back and admire it. When Miles Davis and Picasso have come and gone - or Elvis and Dylan - what more can you say?'

Terry picked up the album cover in front of Skip. "What about this lot? Television?'

'A footnote,' Skip sighed. 'A glorious footnote, a magnificent footnote, but a footnote all the same. Who's going to be on the cover next week?' Terry scratched his head. 'Elvis? Got to be Elvis.' 'Young Elvis. Elvis in 1956. Elvis with the sap rising. White's not going to put the Elvis of 1977 on the cover. No fringed jumpsuits. No Las Vegas glitz. No middle-age paunch. It's going to be Elvis when he was a skinny kid with everything before him. It's going to look like something great, but it will be just another nail in the coffin.' Terry thought about it. 'What coffin?'

'The coffin with our music in it,' Skip said. 'The coffin of rock and roll.' The Marlboro standing upright on the desk was glowing red. Skip picked it up and inhaled deeply, running his bony fingers through matted bird's-nest hair. 'Don't get stuck in rock and roll, man,' Skip told Terry. 'People are starting to treat it like the civil service - a job for life. It was never meant to be a job for life.' Skip smiled, glanced at Terry then looked away. 'But I thought you were hanging out with Dag tonight.'

Ah,' Terry said, attempting to laugh off his mangled heart. 'That didn't work out so good.'

Skip nodded thoughtfully. 'Well, Dag can be hard to handle. He takes whatever he can get his hands on. Starts acting crazy'

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'It wasn't that,' Terry said. 'Nothing to do with taking stuff.' He paused, studied the cover of Marquee Moon that was still in his hands. 'Well, in a way. Misty - she sort of went off with him.'

Skip thought about it. 'Okay,' he said. 'Okay, man. Dag and Misty. Wild.'

T thought he was my friend,' Terry said, trying to laugh and finding it choke somewhere halfway up his throat. 'In Berlin -'

'He's not your friend, man,' Skip said, suddenly full of feeling. 'Dag's not your friend. Doesn't matter how well you got along with him when you were on the road. Dag's a rock star, man. You could know him for twenty years and he still wouldn't be your friend. Not really. Not the way that Ray and Leon are your friends. Or even Billy. Because you give Dag one teeny-fucking-weeny bad review, and you would be out, man, and you would neverbe allowed back in. You can be friendly with these guys - especially guys your own age, who start out when you do. Bit harder with someone like Dag, who's been around the block a few times already, but you can still be friendly with him. You can be friendly with the guys your own age because when it all changes, and it stops being about loving music and starts being about other stuff, about egos and limos, and blow-jobs from skinny models, part of you still remembers when you were all just starting out and all you wanted to do was talk about music and meet girls and you couldn't even get into the fucking Speakeasy. But sooner or later you have to decide if you're a writer, man, or just a groupie who can type.'

Skip sounded bitter now, and Terry thought of the file on him in the photo library. There were photographs of all the writers on The Paper, pictures used to accompany their by-line mug shots mostly, but Skip Jones had a file all to himself. Terry had often pored over those pictures on his nights wandering the deserted office, because Skip was the reason he was here, Skip had lived the life he had dreamed of when he was a music-mad kid working in a gin factory, rushing out with his eighteen pence every Wednesday to buy The Paper a day early.

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Pictures of Skip. There was Skip with Keith Richards in a sundrenched villa in the south of France. Skip with Iggy Pop in a destroyed hotel room in Detroit. Skip with Dag Wood in the dingy gloom of the dressing room at the Roundhouse. And here Skip was tonight - friend of the stars, the finest music writer of his generation, of any generation - killing time in a little review room, no place to rest his brilliant head, his famous friends all gone. Then Skip chuckled to himself as if it was all a bit of a joke after all.

'Wild. Old Dag doesn't change. Tried to fuck your girlfriend, did he?'

'Well, I think he probably has by now,' Terry said, his smile faltering, his spirits sinking at the thought of that enormous barnacle-encrusted todger being unleashed from Dag's leather trousers and pointed at Misty. 'More than once.'

'I wouldn't be so sure,' Skip smiled, setting down his cigarette so that he could fish around in his pocket. 'You never know with Dag if he is going to shoot you up or bugger you sideways or just fall asleep.' His smile vanished. 'But we have to be realistic, man. That chick has probably just had the best loving of her life.'

Terry's spirits sank twenty floors. The best loving of her life? How could he compete with that?

Skip stared Terry right in the eye. It was only for a moment, and the eye contact jolted Terry, but it was real. He hadn't imagined it. Skip Jones had looked him in the eye.

'The question is,' Skip said, 'what are you going to do about it?' Terry shuffled his feet. 'Well, I don't know. What can I do?'

Skip pulled out an assortment of pills, and began rifling through them. When he held out his hand to Terry, there were a dozen different-coloured capsules in his palm. 'You give these to Dag,' Skip said. 'With my compliments.' Terry stared at the pills. 'What are they?'

'You give these to Dag and it will be a while before he fucks your girlfriend again. Or anybody else's.' 'Ex-girlfriend,' Terry scowled. 'She's not my girlfriend any more. Are you kidding? She's nothing to me.'

But he took the pills from Skip Jones, and stuffed them in the pocket of his dead man's mohair jacket, as if perhaps she was still something after all. Leon dreamed of Bambi.

Strange, he had always thought, that the world considered the little deer to be Walt Disney at its most saccharine. To Leon, Bambi had always seemed like the first snuff movie.

He had been taken to see the film at the Swiss Cottage Odeon when he was five years old, and he had found it such a deeply traumatic experience that his mother had to lead him trembling and tearful to the lobby well before the final credits.

How could the other boys and girls just sit there chomping on their choc-ices? Bambi was a film where a child loses its mother, where a world bursts into flames and - the part that haunted Leon's dreams as he lay tossing and turning and sweating inside his sleeping bag - that made tangible the horror of the moment when paradise is defiled.

He awoke with a gasp, already sitting up, and he realised immediately that it was all true. They were here at last. Bailiffs wen-kicking down the front door of the squat, the windows were caving in, there were men shouting, women screaming, the baby crying. Man had entered the forest.

Ruby was still sleeping by his side, a thin arm thrown across his waist. Leon shook her, unzipped the bag and was on his feet, the bare floorboards like sandpaper beneath his toes, pulling on his clothes. The other couple in the room were already half-dressed and stuffing meagre belongings into rucksacks. It still looked dark outside, but the room was bright, lit by moonlight and the headlights of a dozen cars.

'Get up now,' he said, ducking as a half-brick smashed through the window. There were voices in the street. Men shouting about

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dossers, stirring themselves for the fight, pumping themselves up. 'They're coming in.' Except they were not coming in. It was worse than that.

From downstairs Leon could hear nails being pounded into wood. Voices from inside the house being raised in anger. Curses and threats and cries of fear. He went to the window and saw burly shadows carrying thick planks of wood to the house. 'The bastards,' Leon said. 'They're sealing us in.'

He had known that one day the bailiffs would come, but he had always imagined it would be to throw them into the street. Many times Leon had envisaged the final battle for the squat to be a glorious siege - Leon standing shoulder to shoulder with veterans of the barricades of Paris in hand-to-hand combat with hired thugs and the boys in blue. Room to room fighting - like the battle for Stalingrad. Now he was faced with the choice of staying inside a boarded-up squat until the landlord decided they'd had enough, or legging it. If he had been alone, it would have been different. But he didn't want anything bad ever to happen to Ruby.

He took her arm and they fled for the bedroom door, still pulling on their clothes. At the top of the stairs he glimpsed her long pale legs in a wash of moonlight and it made him catch his breath. He stopped her, and gave her a chance to pull on her dress. He even zipped her up, allowing his fingers to rest on her shoulder blades for just a moment. His hands were shaking. She patted him reassuringly and gave him a smile. Her hand was cool and still.

One floor below he could hear the sounds of scuffles and the staccato pounding of hammers. Most of the downstairs windows were already boarded up, and slashes of headlights came through the slats in the wood. But the front door was half-open and either side of it a scrum of heaving bodies fought for control. Leon and Ruby headed in the opposite direction, to the back of the house, where they had just started sealing the kitchen door. Leon cursed them and threw himself at the door, shoulder first, and a plank flew away and caught a bailiff flush in the face. Then they were out into the garden and into the night, tripping over the step, obscenities being screamed behind them, something heavy thrown at their heads, maybe a hammer, but whistling past and lost in the grass. They were not followed, but Leon helped her over a dozen garden fences before they stopped, sprawling exhausted on a manicured lawn and panting for breath next to an ornamental pond and a garden gnome with a fishing pole. You could still hear the voices and the hammering and the fighting in the distance. It made him shudder. Squatting was all right when you were young and on your own. But what about later? What about when you found someone? 'Sorry,' he said. 'I didn't expect them to come tonight.' 'Now you really are homeless,' said Ruby, and it made him laugh, and his mouth was on her mouth again, and the dew was soaking his knees, and she was laughing too, his hands on her fabulous face, and he was mad for her, alive for her, for she was all that he ever wanted. The first tube train was still hours away.

They held hands and started walking west down the Marylebonc Road, with the early birds singing in Regent's Park to their right, and the sky behind them just beginning to smudge with the dawn. He was going to walk her to her door. That was the plan, although they didn't feel the need to discuss it much. Leon was going to make sure she got there. Home and dry. Safe and sound.

He wished he had money for a hotel. Wouldn't it be great to have money for a hotel and just crawl into bed and stay there all day long? To kiss and cuddle and fuck until their strength was gone? Wouldn't it be great to have some money for a change? Still, if he couldn't get back into bed with her, at least he could take her home.

But a Ford Cortina full of boys pulled up alongside them just beyond the great dome of Madame Tussaud's. Leon looked at

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them with distaste. They were the kind who were always threatening to kick his head in. 'Darling, do you want a lift?' 'Where you going, love? Acton? Ealing? Greenford?'

Ruby looked at Leon, almost apologetically. Greenford, yes. She was going to Greenford and back to her real life.

They were depressingly familiar - capped-sleeve T-shirts showing off pale, meaty biceps, hair still worn in sub-Rod Stewart feather cuts, short leather jackets that seemed one size too small. But they didn't seem particularly drunk. And Leon couldn't deny that they were going her way. He couldn't deny that.

'It's okay,' Ruby said, touching his arm. She sounded a little sad and very tired. 'They're not going to do anything to me. Just drive me home and ask me for my phone number. And I'll give them a fake one. Okay, baby?' He nodded, not risking words.

The sun peeped over the dome of Madame Tussauds. After the storms of the night before it was a shock to see the blinding light of an August dawn, to be reminded that it was still summer. Sunlight glinted on Leon's newly blond locks. She touched his hair - proud of what she had done, and he had to smile. For the very first time in his life, he felt he looked just about okay. Maybe even more than okay. 'Well,' he said. 'Sorry about - you know. Everything.'

'No, I had fun,' she said. There was a real warmth and sweetness in her, Leon thought. She was beautiful, and she was tough, but it was that warmth and sweetness that had him hooked. She laughed, and Leon thought - the beautiful ones. They have it so easy. 'It was… different,' she smiled. The boys waited patiently in the car.

'I had fun too,' Leon said. He couldn't describe what the night had meant to him - how he had been lost in her, and the music, and the sex. He couldn't put that into words. For the first time in his life, words failed him. 'And you're a good dancer,' she said. 'Come on,' he said.

'Sure you are,' she insisted. 'You just need to - I don't know. Relax a little.'

Then the sky was full of sound, and at first it seemed like another storm, but it was louder than any noise Leon had ever heard, louder than any storm, and it grew louder still until suddenly it was directly overhead and he looked up to see the new plane, the one that resembled a giant white bird, Concorde, just one year old and slim as a rocket and gleaming white and gold in the dawn, losing altitude as it prepared for landing west of the city, not far from her home. It was beautiful.

When he looked back, the Ford Cortina was pulling away and Ruby was waving from the rear window. He waved in return, knowing he had meant what he said in bed, what he had said in the middle of the heat and madness, when the words were meant to be just for the moment. Leon loved her.

He really loved her, it wasn't just the sex talking. He loved her although he didn't even know her. How did he manage that? How can you love someone who you don't even know? He was twenty years old, and it was easy.

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THIRTEEN

'You should leave him,' Ray told her.

This wasn't his way. His way was to be cool. Three years at The Paper had taught him that it was the only way to be. You were cool when you didn't care, and you were cool when you did care. But this was different. He couldn't be cool with her. 'Your bloody husband,' he said. 'Mr Love Muscle.'

She smiled politely and he knew it was hopeless. Where would she go? With him? In a few hours he wouldn't even have a job. He saw himself through her eyes - a dumb kid still living with his parents, smitten after one night of good sex. But you don't walk away from the kind of life she had. Even Ray knew that much.

She looked from his face to the lightening sky, smiling slightly. 'It doesn't feel like there was a storm last night, does it?' she said.

They were sitting in her Lotus Elan in Hyde Park, by the curve in the lake where the Serpentine meets the Long Water. The sun poured through the great trees and coated the water with a sheen of molten gold. On the far side of the Serpentine there was a small wooden jetty with blue-and-white boats clustered around it.

'We should go rowing sometime,' she said. 'I haven't been rowing for years.' They watched twenty horses from the barracks of the Household Cavalry lazily clop down a wide sandy track, their riders in full uniform, gleaming breastplates and red Spartan cloaks, the white horsehair tails swishing on their white-and-gold helmets, and yet the soldiers were clearly off duty, carelessly yawning and rubbing the sleep from their eyes and talking among themselves. It was a good moment. But something in Ray seemed bound to spoil it.

'I mean,' he said, 'if you're really so unhappy, if you're really as unhappy as you say, then why don't you just get a divorce?'

'Are you going to bang on about this?' she said, not smiling now.

'Yes,' he said. 'I'm going to bang on and on aboutit. I'm not even talking about you and me. I'm talking about saving yourself. Getting the fuck out of that loveless place.'

She was silent, still considering the lake, and for a while he didn't know if she was thinking about getting divorced or going rowing. He wasn't just frustrated with her. He was angry with himself. He was meant to be with John Lennon, not some married woman whose husband was too rich to leave.

'It's not so easy,' she said finally. 'You sort of get stuck with each other. I don't know how to explain it.' She stifled a yawn, and he could see she was very tired. She shook her head. 'It's hard to make the break. Hard to face all the changes. You're scared of the unknown, I guess. Scared of being alone.'

He didn't know what to say. Everything he knew about marriage he had learned from his parents. Which possibly meant that he knew nothing. He tried to imagine why his father and mother had once loved each other, and why it had changed. Impossible to ever really know, Ray thought, but although he had grown to hate his father, he could understand how his mother would have been attracted to the old man's strength, his physical certainty, that manly bearing. Women seemed to love that crap.

And how could his mother ever have known that his strength would curdle into shouting and bullying and violence? That the things she loved about him would be the weapons he turned on

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her and their children? Who could have seen that coming? This woman beside him, the woman he was urging to leave her husband - they must have loved each other once, they must have been mad for each other at the start. People changed. He saw that now. They changed in ways that you could never imagine.

It was not difficult for Ray to see why his father had fallen in love with his mother. All the evidence was there in the smiling black-and-white photograph of their wedding day, the fair, delicate beauty of his mother's youth, and that heartbreaking gentleness she had about her, an almost child-like vulnerability, guaranteed to bring out the protective instincts in a man like his father, who was so old fashioned that he considered combing hair effeminate (you were meant to just use your fingers until it all fell out).

But his mother had also changed with the years, and the changes had been accelerated and soured by the death of Ray's older brother. The girlish softness had turned into a kind of timidity, a net curtain-twitching, kitchen-dwelling neurosis, a fear of life. A love of home had degenerated into a form of agoraphobia. It seemed to Ray that the reasons his parents had fallen for each other were the same reasons that they now drove each other insane. Perhaps every marriage was like that. It wasn't true that you killed the things you loved. It was far more likely that they would kill you. And could he imagine his mother walking out on his dad? Of course not. Where would she go?

'But you don't love him,' Ray said, sounding outraged now, and unable to do anything about it. And he can't love you, can he? I don't see how he can love you and give you that… thing.'

He couldn't speak of the birthday present. The idea of it appalled him.

'I told you - I'm too old for bedsits and grotty one-bedroom flats,' she said. 'Someone stealing your milk from the fridge. Arguments about who does the washing up. The sound of shagging in the next room. Someone playing bloody Wishbone Ash upstairs. I've done all that. Ten years ago.' Ray hadn't done any of that. 'How old are you anyway?' he said. 'Twenty-eight today.' A knowing smile. 'Too old for you.'

His heart sank. It was all hopeless. 'But too young for what you've got,' he said bitterly.

He was upset, working himself up for an argument, loathing the thought of her going back to that life - the big house, the flash car, the husband with a wallet where his heart should be. He felt as though he could only stand to say goodbye to her if harsh words had been exchanged. But she was not going to let the night end that way.

'Don't be so angry with him,' she said gently. 'Who do you think pays for everything? Who bought my clothes, this car, the bed you slept in last night? Besides - he likes you. He told me so.'

He thought of her husband's band. The packed basketball arenas of the Mid West going ape shit - 'Whooh! Rock and roll!' - for their souped-up R amp;B. They were all right, Ray thought. Nothing special. A good bar band, writ large, pub rock to fill stadiums. Nothing more. And Ray thought of their manager, her husband, who had always been pleasant enough to him, but who in the end was just another record industry lifer who happened to be standing in the right club when the right band came by. He would nevei get married, Ray decided. It robbed you of yourself.

'You think you're nothing,' Ray told her. 'But 1 think you're terrific'

She looked at him for a while, and then she kissed him quickly on the mouth.

'Come on,' she said, getting out of the car. She took his hand and they walked down to the boathouse, the grass still slick and glistening with the apocalyptic rains that came down the night Elvis died.

It was far too early to hire a boat, but they agreed that nobody would mind very much if they just borrowed one for a while. Giggling now, their shoes sopping wet from the grass, and afraid of falling into the lake, Ray stumbled to the sharp end of the boat -

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the bow, she insisted on calling it - while she settled herself facing him, slipping the oars into their worn metal rings.

They pushed off, gliding over the still glassy water, and she began to row with a slow, lazy motion. She was good. He had to admit it. Far better than he would have been. They smiled at each other, and didn't feel the need to talk. A few black swans followed them until it was clear that they were not going to provide breakfast, and then they peeled away and squawked back to the shore, their wings tucked up beneath them.

The sun was already dazzling and in the distance Ray could hear the muffled roar of the traffic on the Bayswater Road and Park Lane, heralding the day to come. But Hyde Park still seemed to be sleeping, and it was a thousand shades of green.

When they were in the middle of the lake she pulled in the oars and let the boat drift. Ray trailed his hands in the water as the boat lazily traced a half-circle, at first pointing south towards the Albert Memorial, then drifting round to aim at the statue of Peter Pan on the west bank.

Ray watched her tugging at the gold ring on the third finger of her left hand, frowning with the effort for a few seconds, unable to get it off, and then pulling it over her knuckle and free.

She held the ring between the thumb and index finger of her right hand, regarding it thoughtfully, as if she couldn't quite work out how it had ever got there. Then she threw it into the air as far as she possibly could.

The ring hit the water with a soft splash that made the black swans stir for a moment, anticipating breakfast again, flapping their wings towards the boat, and then turning away when they realised that it was nothing. As Leon took the lift up to the twenty-first floor, he worked on his review. Leni and the Riefenstahls. A dumb name for a dumb band. Leon didn't regret missing their gig. He was glad he had missed it. Nothing would ever be better than meeting Ruby and dancing to 'Shame' with Ruby and having sex with Ruby in a sleeping bag. Nothing would ever be better than the night he had just had, the first night of his life when he felt like he had escaped the confines of his own skin.

Leon entered the office, dawn streaming through the windows now, and noticed a light on in the review room. Skip Jones was in there, surrounded by upright cigarette butts and records.

'You got any smokes?' Skip said, looking somewhere over Leon's shoulder.

Leon fumbled in the pocket of his Lewis Leather, always a little nervous in the presence of Skip, and pulled out a crumpled pack. There were still a few in there. Leon realised with a twinge of pride that he hadn't had much chance to smoke.

'Wild,' Skip said, glancing at the pack and then briefly at Leon's face. Leon offered him the pack, but there was something wrong with Skip's hands. They were shaking so badly that Skip dropped the cigarette he pulled out, and he had to hold his hands as if to stop the trembling as Leon picked up the cigarette from the stained and pock-marked carpet. They both pretended that nothing had happened. 'You review somebody last night?' Skip said.

Leon lit two cigarettes, took a long drag from both and passed one to Skip. T was meant to review the Riefenstahls,' Leon said. 'But, to tell you the truth, I got a bit sidetracked.'

Skip studied the tip of the Marlboro. His hands were still shaking, but holding the cigarette seemed to calm them. 'What kind of sidetrack?'

'I met a girl,' Leon said. 'I met this great girl. This unbelievable girl'

Skip smiled shyly. 'Well, I missed gigs for worse reasons than that. Don't worry about it. The older guys are going to have their hands full with Elvis. They won't miss your review.'

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'Oh, I think I'm going to write it up anyway,' Leon said, grinning. 'But don't tell anyone.' Skip looked concerned. 'Wild,' he said, sounding worried.

'It'll be all right,' Leon said reassuringly, more to himself than Skip. 'I've seen Leni and the Riefenstahls plenty of times, and they were always rubbish. What's the point in us writing about a band like that anyway? Bunch of posers. They're not going to change the world, are they?'

Leon spoke with his usual total certainty, but inside he was confused. He thought about Ruby and Evelyn 'Champagne' King and how he had felt when he had worked up the courage to dance. Being at Lewisham last Saturday seemed to show him the road he had to take - fighting Fascism, being committed, awakening the masses. But last night suggested that the masses were already more awake than he would ever be.

'Skip, do you think that people can love black music and still be racist?'

Skip Jones shrugged. 'I don't know, man. Unfortunately, yeah, 1 guess so - people can love black music and hate black people -but maybe not if they listen to enough of it.' Skip carefully placed what remained of the cigarette on its filter tip with all the rest. 'Hey, you're right to make a stand. If you don't care at - what are you now? Twenty? - then you never will. And it's good to get these bits and pieces into The Paper. Fuck, man, Nazis are a complete bummer.'

Leon thought of the faces contorted by hate at Lewisham. The total, all-consuming loathing on the other side. The jeering sieg heils and Nazi salutes. Which one of them was her father?

'But they are never going to be more than bits and pieces,' Skip said. 'If this was the Daily Worker then no dude would buy it, no dude would advertise in it, and you, dude, would be selling it on a street corner and outside factory gates. And frankly, the number of dudes buying would be few.' He rubbed his eyes, dragged fingers through his oily Keith Richards hair. 'The music isn't there to save the world,' Skip told Leon, and the words struck him like a bolt of lightning. 'It's there to save your life.'

Skip smiled, looking exhausted now, but the trembling in his hands was subsiding. Leon realised that he should start writing soon if he wanted to finish before they all began arriving at the office. But he loved talking to Skip. Even though he still felt confused about what he should expect from music, and what the world should expect from him, somehow it made him feel better.

But the morning was coming fast now, so Leon said see you later to Skip, went to his desk, threaded an A4 sheet of paper into the red plastic Valentine typewriter and stared at the empty page. And then he thought.

There were many things that annoyed him about Leni and the Riefenstahls - their toying with Fascist symbols, their po-faced stage demeanour, their clumping three-chord songs dressed up as something profound. But it was their patronising smugness that really infuriated him. If you knew that Leni Riefenstahl was the director of Triumph of the Will, that chilling celebration of Nazi Germany on parade, then you could be in their gang. And if the reference flew over your head, then you couldn't. Leon began to type.

Ever heard of Triumph of the Will, dear reader? When Leni and the Riefenstahls played the Red Cow on a wet Tuesday night, it was triumph of the wankers.

Not brilliant, but pleasantly abusive. The sun was coming up strong now, streaming through the Venetian blinds and smoked glass, making him squint, and his mind and body were suddenly aware that they had been up all night. Leon numbed himself with scalding vending-machine black coffee and didn't stop pounding the typewriter until he had a 500-word hatchet job. Then he rose from his desk, stretched his aching limbs, and deposited the review on Kevin White's desk.

On his way to the lifts, he glanced through the window of the review room. Skip was resting his head on the table, his face turned

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away from the door, surrounded by old cigarette butts and new vinyl. He appeared to be sleeping, so Leon didn't say goodbye. Ray left the park and started walking east down Oxford Street, the sun directly ahead of him, hurting his eyes, coming up over the miserable concrete slab of Centre Point. The night's broken glass crunched beneath his feet like ice.

The day was coming on but the armies of the night were still abroad - stragglers reeling home from the night before and bleary-eyed workers returning from the graveyard shift, all sharing the rubbish-strewn streets with the first of the day's commuters.

Ray increased his pace, wanting the chance to clear his desk at The Paperbefore the working day began. The fact that he had not found John Lennon got all mixed up with the woman he had met who could not leave her husband. His heart felt like it had been kicked down the street, but he wasn't sure what had kicked it the hardest. If only he could have been with her. If only he could have tracked down John. If only he could have done one thing right.

It was too late now. The night was dead and gone and there was nothing left to do but grab the few souvenirs he had collected from the last three years - an Emmylou Harris promo T-shirt, a C-90 cassette of his interview with Jackson Browne, an 8x10 photo Misty had taken of Ray smiling shyly next to James Taylor -and get out before there was any need for goodbyes. That was the thing that would really break his heart. Having to say goodbye to Terry, and Leon, and the old life. No goodbyes, he thought. Just go.

The sun was temporarily lost behind the department stores of Oxford Street and suddenly he could see clearly. Ahead of him a larky pack of shaven-headed lads shoved and jostled each other. They were dressed in the latest revival style - number one crops, Ben Sherman shirts, thin white braces, white Sta-Press trousers and highly polished DM boots. You were starting to see them all over the city - the new skinheads, who were never going to deck them- selves out in Vivienne Westwood T-shirts and bondage trousers. Ray swerved towards the road, planning to give them a wide berth.

He saw that there was an Asian kid with glasses and a plastic Adidas kitbag walking towards them. There were a few jocular greetings, and someone chanting, 'Oh, Doctor, I'm in trouble -well, goodness gracious me!' and then suddenly they had the Asian kid's bag in their hands and they were tossing it between them, the kid playing piggy in the middle as they easily held him at bay. On their fingers gold signet rings flashed with the sunlight.

The bag must have been open because the next thing Ray knew the filthy pavement was covered with the kid's pitiful belongings. Some foil-wrapped sandwiches, a thermos flask, a book called Computer Programming for Beginners. The kid was on his hands and knees, retrieving his stuff, as the skins - tiring of their game now - tossed his kitbag into the middle of the road, and began kicking around the foil-wrapped sandwiches.

'They think it's all over,' one of them shouted, booting the sandwiches so hard that the foil split open and shreds of white bread and cheddar cheese and tomato flew everywhere. 'It is now!'

They were still good humoured, pretending to be football commentators or Peter Sellers, and their mood only changed when Ray passed to one side of them and just couldn't keep his mouth shut. He picked up Computer Programming for Beginners, the sole of a size-ten boot imprinted on the cover, and gave it to the kid. Those happy skins - they were everything he loathed. 'Why don't you leave him alone?' he said.

They were immediately on him. Fists flying, boots lashing out, so engorged with rage that the wild blows seemed to skim off his head and legs or miss him completely, and it didn't even hurt very much at first. Then one of them had him in some kind of head-lock, and Ray could smell the sweat and Hai Karate aftershave, and he caught a glimpse of the Asian kid retrieving his kitbag just before a big red number 73 bus crushed it under its wheels. Then the Asian kid was running away and Ray was flat on his

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back, the toes of the boots catching him in his ribs and head, not missing now, hurting him now, and he was curling up on the pavement, covering his eyes and his balls, gasping at the stabs of pain. Then, as abruptly as it began, they were backing off.

When Ray looked up he saw Terry lash out with the side of his foot and drive it deep into a midriff that was adorned in Ben Sherman blue-and-white gingham. There were three skinheads around him and Terry smacked one in the face with a right hander and, as his momentum spun him around, kicked another up the arse of his Sta-Press. Then they were running, shouting that Terry had better keep looking over his shoulder, telling him that their brothers would kill him, and Ray saw that they were just weaselly little nothings, all swagger and spite and sixteen at the outside, lousy rotten bullies who folded as soon as someone hit them back.

Still, he was impressed, and shook his head with wonder as Terry pulled him to his feet. 'Who the fucking hell taught you -?' Ray began.

The words died in his throat because Terry had struck the pose of his hero - a boxer's stance, wide legged and left side on, but with the hands relaxed not clenched, watching the pack of skinheads go out of the very corner of his eyes while moving his head from side to side - slowly, snake-like, as though he had a mild nervous disorder - and Ray knew the answer to his question before it had even left his mouth. Bruce Lee. Bruce Lee taught Terry how to do that. Terry had the Ford Capri with him.

He was a poor driver, hanging on to the steering wheel as if it was a life belt, constantly drifting either too close to the centre of the road and making other drivers hoot with alarm, or so near to the kerb that the Capri's wheels sometimes hit concrete with a screech of rubber and metal. But Ray was so exhausted by now that he dozed in the passenger seat, a new song on the breakfast show coming out of the radio. 'Dancing Queen' by Abba, the Hairy Cornflake said, and it was full of yearning and youthful nostalgia, as if it was about this kid who was already missing some lost golden age. Having the time of your life - oooh, oooh. Terry went over a bump in the road and Ray was jolted awake. He expected to see the bleak towers of the South Bank. But they were somewhere in the backstreets of the West End, just north of Marble Arch, where the Arab cafes and restaurants seemed to go on for miles. Are we nearly there?' Ray said. Terry pulled the car up. 'Something I've got to do first.'

They were outside a hotel. Ray rubbed his eyes and realised that it was the Hotel Blanc, the place that had almost been his first stop of the evening. It felt like a lifetime ago.

Ray watched Terry walk slowly towards the main doors, and saw him disappear into the lobby. Ray must have fallen asleep for a moment because the next thing he knew the fire alarm was ringing and Terry was coming out of the main doors.

Halfway to the car Terry paused, and waited, holding his right hand, which seemed to have been cut somehow. Soon the guests began to stream out of the hotel, blinking in shock in the dazzling daylight, like the living dead woken from some timeless slumber, unsure where to go, in their night clothes or half-dressed or in the kind of white towelling bathrobes that were scattered all over the floor of Terry's bedsit.

Then there was Misty and Dag Wood, coming through the main doors, walking towards Terry, while he just stood there holding his hand, and trying to stop the blood.

Misty was in the white dress of the night before, but with a robe draped over her shoulders and carrying her biker's boots. Dag was barefoot, naked from the waist up, the fly of his leather trousers unzipped, his face hollow with years of abuse but his body muscled and toned.

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More than ever, Ray thought, Dag looked like the freshly deceased corpse of Charles Atlas.

And then Ray forgot about Terry and his girl troubles because there was a small woman in hotpants with hair like a black haystack coming quickly through the doors of the lobby, and behind her was a hawk-faced man in round wire glasses, taller than Ray had expected but unforgettable and unmistakable. A face that Ray felt he knew better than his own. The face of John Lennon.

Somehow the school satchel was still hanging from his shoulder. Somehow it still contained the clunking great tape recorder he had borrowed from Terry at the other end of the night. Somehow he was breathing the same air as John Lennon.

And somehow, despite being almost paralysed by exhaustion and fear and love, Ray got out of the car. 'For you, Dag,' Terry said, the words stalling in a mouth that was suddenly bone dry with nerves and anger and this terrible grief. He couldn't even look at her. 'From Skip.'

Terry held out his fist, palm down, and Dag's corrugated features split in a reptilian smile. He seized Terry's fist, for all the world as if they were old pals shaking hands, and Terry palmed him the pills.

Then he pulled his hand away. He couldn't stand to touch the old bastard.

'I'll save these for the Rainbow,' Dag said, referring to the gig in Finsbury Park later that night. It would be the highlight of his tour. 'Thank the Skipper for me.'

Terry nodded, poker-faced and trying hard to keep it neutral. He still hadn't looked at Misty. Then Dag was talking to her, casual as can be, making sure she was okay for tickets to the Rainbow, right under Terry's nose. 'Terry's name will be on the door,' she was saying. 'Plus one.'

Dag yawned and stretched like an old torn cat, as if it had been a long night and he was ready to turn in. They were letting people back into the hotel by now, and Dag smiled farewell at the pair of them with a sickening kind of intimacy. As if he fucking owns us, Terry thought. They watched him go.

'I've got this for you,' Misty said, slipping the hotel bathrobe off her shoulders. Terry shook his head. T don't collect those things any more.' She looked surprised.

T mean, what's so special about those things?' Terry said, letting his eyes rest upon her now. Forcing himself to look at her. 'Everybody's used it, haven't they?' She looked exasperated. 'Don't freak out.' 'I'm not freaking out.' She rolled her tired eyes. 'Nothing happened, okay?'

Words failed him. For about two seconds. 'Fuck off, you slag,' he said. She flinched. 'Terry - I didn't have sex with him, okay?' He shook his head. T don't believe you.'

The crowd was melting away. She noticed the Ford Capri for the first time. 'Is that my father's car?'

He looked at the car, expecting to see Ray. But his friend had gone. 'You're a fucking liar,' he said, turning away. She grabbed his arm.

'Look - he didn't want to do anything, okay? And neither did I. Okay, Terry? We just talked all night.' Misty got a dreamy look in her eyes. 'Well, until he passed out.'

Terry turned his back on her. But he wasn't walking away now. He wanted to hear it. He wanted to believe her. He wanted things to be the way they were.

Misty was babbling, name-dropping, still dizzy from the experience. 'We talked about Byron, Jim Morrison, Nietzsche. It was fascinating, actually. He must have chaos within him, who would

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give birth to a dancing star. Dag has a mind the size of a planet.' Terry snorted. 'Yeah, and a knob the size of a donkey.' She gave him that cool look. 'Well, you would know more about that than I do.' Then she smiled. 'He said this thing, and I thought it was rather sad - he said, / prefer drugs to women.' Terry stared at her. Dag had said exactly the same thing to him. And it was true - that's what he was like. Dag Wood was from the old school. He would fuck anything and he would take anything. But he would much rather take everything than fuck everything. Perhaps it was because in his world drugs were harder to come by than women. Or maybe they just made him feel better. Terry immediately knew two things beyond any doubt. Misty was telling the truth. And Dag Wood was doomed. Not the same way Billy Blitzen was doomed. Dag would probably live to be a hundred. But he was doomed all the same. Terry almost felt sorry about giving him all those laxatives. Everyone was so nice. That was the thing that shocked Ray. Once he had got over that first paralysing second when he knew he was going to actually open his mouth and talk to John Lennon, everyone seemed to go out of their way to make things easy for him.

At first it was just the pair of them, this magnificent, vilified couple, a man and a woman who'd showed Ray the way a marriage could be. Standing there, outside the Blanc, seeming almost shy as he stumbled towards them. In a daze, in a dream, strung out with exhaustion and excitement and the realisation that it was all true, it was really happening.

Ray said the name with a question mark - John? - as if they were old friends, as if Ray had known him all his life - and of course that's exactly how it felt - and then he said his own name -Ray Keeley - and the name of his magazine - The Paper - and John, the man, John Lennon in the flesh, was saying how he knew The Paper from way back, when the group were just starting out -the group! Ray knew what group he was talking about! - and how they played The Paper's annual poll-winners concert a few times before the madness forced them off the road.

And Yoko was smiling at him, and John was smiling, and Ray wasn't quite sure what to do next, but then there was some assistant person, not someone from the record company but some permanent assistant there to smooth their way through the world, and she was tired and wary, but John was inviting Ray to come and have a cup of tea, and Ray thought - what a wonderful world.

This was his world, and this was his time, where a kid from a music paper could just walk up to the biggest rock star on the planet and then get to hang out with him for a while.

And Ray saw that it was still true - that sense of community that he had glimpsed in the playground where they sang the songs of the Beatles, that world of shared feelings. It was real. It wasn't bullshit, it wasn't hype. Everything he had heard in the music was true.

Walking through the lobby of the Hotel Blanc, Ray was awm of the dumbfounded stares - what must it be like? To be stared at in every room in the world? - and Yoko was asking luin.1 question about the B-52's, this new American band dial U.iy knew nothing about, nothing at all. Terry could have given her chaptei and verse, but it didn't really matter because it wasn't a contest, you didn't have to pretend to be cool, or clever, Ray could just be himself. And as they rode the lift to the top floor - John and Yoko and Ray and the woman who was some kind of personal assistant - Ray felt a joy like nothing he had ever known rise up inside him, and it obliterated the nerves and the fear and the embarrassment that he couldn't answer Yoko's questions about the B-52's. He had held out his hand and John Lennon had taken it. And Ray knew he had been right to believe in the music. He had been right to believe all along.

And then he was inside the hotel room - although it seemed more like a house, it was nothing like the thousand other hotel

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rooms that Ray had seen occupied by musicians. The room went on for ever. There was even a piano in it.

And then sitting on the sofa, facing John, warm and chuckling, happy to talk about music with this kid, this strange kid who had refused to cut his hair, Yoko sitting beside him, that great black haystack in her face, but that was okay, that was to be expected, and the permanent assistant was phoning down for some tea, and Ray could do this thing, because he had actually done it many times before, and it was what he lived for, the music was what he lived for, the best thing in his life, the only thing that had always made perfect sense.

And there it was - John Lennon's voice - the talking voice no different from the singing voice - droll and wise and full of soul, kind and mocking and just the way it should be. They talked -how could Ray ever have imagined that there would be nothing to say? And after a while, just after the tea had been placed before them, John Lennon reached across and pressed the start button on Terry's tape machine.

'You should turn that thing on, Ray,' John Lennon said. 'I don't want you to lose your job, man.' There was a radio behind the counter of the cafe. Leon didn't notice it until he was counting out the coins for his tea and bacon sandwich.

'… swamped by people with a different culture' a strange new voice was saying. A woman's voice, somehow transparendy artificial and yet full of conviction. A voice that was fake and genuine, all at once.' We are not in politics to ignore people's worries.' Nagging, strident, wheedling. "We are in politics to deal with them.'

Leon's jaw dropped. He stared at the radio and kept staring even when 'Don't Go Breaking My Heart' replaced the woman's voice. 'Who's that?' Leon said, desperate to know.

Behind the counter was a fat man in a washed-out Silver Jubilee T-shirt. 'Elton John and Kiki Dee,' he said. 'No, no - the woman. The woman who was talking. The one going on about being swamped.'

The man handed Leon his bacon sandwich. 'Maggie Thatcher,' he said. He looked at the radio with naked admiration. 'About time we had someone to stand up for us,' said the man in the Silver Jubilee T-shirt.

Leon gripped his bacon sandwich like someone in shock. He had not foreseen this. He had not seen this coming. The relevance of the major political parties had seemed to melt away in recent years and as he had sold his copies of Red Mist and attended anti-racist rallies and pogoed to the Clash, the woman who had led the Conservatives for the last eighteen months had barely registered on his radar. Why should she?

Leon had assumed that the government of the day was an irrelevance now and would be irrelevant for ever. He had imagined that the fight for the future would be decided on the streets.

But as he gripped his bacon sandwich, he suddenly saw 1? alternative future in a parallel universe, where a mainslM?? politician told the country - or a large pari of the???? exactly what it wanted to hear about immigration, I he union») to and order, counting the pennies, keeping your net «? ttini I lean

No screaming skinheads and sieg heils and Nazi fantasies. Nothing so crass. Just a different kind of mainstream, steamrolling everything in its path. And he knew with total certainty that Ruby's father would happily vote for the owner of the voice that was both fake and genuine, a voice that seemed designed to speak for the nation. How had Leon failed to see it coming? How had he been so blind?

And then Leon suddenly had something else to worry about. Because Junior was entering the cafe, followed by his henchmen.

In the growing daylight, the Dagenham Dogs were a grotesque sight. The clumsy home-made nature of their face piercings, all those safety pins penetrating the flesh of nose, lip and cheek, the assorted stains of beer, blood and dirt on the front of their

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sleeveless T-shirts, their eye make-up a complete mess. In the harrowing light of dawn, the three-teardrop tattoo under Junior's right eye looked as if it had been done by a monkey with a welding iron.

The cafe was packed with builders getting the goodness and grease of a full English breakfast under their belts before going to work. Hard men who would normally allow themselves a few smirks at the freaks who were walking the streets these days. But even the builders looked down at their fried eggs and red-top tabloids as the Dagenham Dogs passed by.

'I don't want any trouble,' said the Maggie Thatcher fan behind the counter, and Leon thought that the man sounded like a bartender from a Western. 'Outside,' Junior told Leon.

He slowly got up from his chair, his bacon sandwich untouched, and followed them out of the cafe, with nobody daring to look at him, the condemned man.

In the street Junior faced Leon, Dogs to the left of him, Dogs to the right of him, a terrible fraternity of pierced ugly bastards.

Junior took Leon's head in his hands, almost lovingly, and then seized his ears. Then he crashed his face into the windscreen of the nearest car. The shock was greater than the pain, although the pain seemed to double with every passing second. Something was torn on Leon's forehead, and there was something warm and wet trickling in his eyebrows. As Leon's head was yanked back up, he saw he had been bashed against the windscreen of a rather beautiful car. A gold Buick, all tail fins and chrome and black-and-white piebald upholstery. Like something from a Buddy Holly song, Leon thought, or a car that Elvis might have bought with his first royalty cheque from Sam Phillips. Leon's head felt as though it had been kicked by a horse.

'You lot make me laugh,' Junior said, still gripping Leon's ears. 'All you middle-class wankers at The Paper. REBELS WITHOUT A COCK, is it? So I don't have a cock, is that what you reckon?' T was speaking metaphorically,' Leon gasped. The pain, the incredible expanding pain, made it difficult to think straight. Junior seemed unconvinced.

'You think you can say what you like and there's no comeback. You think you're in some kind of student debating society. You think -'

A high-pitched voice cut in from out of nowhere. 'That your car, mate?'

Junior turned to look at the speaker, not relinquishing his grip on Leon's ears. It was the biggest Ted that Leon had ever seen. Leon's mouth dropped open, stunned with recognition. It was Titch himself, the giant among Teds.

Titch was surrounded by a dozen of his greasy-quiffed tribe, young Teds in their violent prime, all of them weighing up the Dagenham Dogs. 'What?' Junior said, his train of thought interrupted.

Titch had a surprisingly gentle voice. Like Elvis singing one of his devotional hymns, Leon thought. 'There Will Be Peace in the Valley', perhaps. T said - is that your car, mate?'

Still very reasonable, but indicating the windscreen of the gold Buick. Leon's head had left a smear of bloody grime on the glass. Junior shook his head. T got the bus,' he said. 'It's not my car.'

The mountain of a Ted nodded, seemingly satisfied with the Ulswer. Titch turned to look at his friends, sharing a chilled smile before once again facing Junior.

T know it's not your car, you tattooed tit,' Titch said. 'BECAUSE IT'S MY FUCKING CAR!'

Then Titch swung a meaty right hook and it sent Junior flying,.ind then sprawling. Like George Foreman smacking Joe Frazier, Leon thought, the blow that lifted Smokin' Joe right off his feet in the hot Jamaican night. Junior let go of Leon's ears.

Tilch stared down at Junior's prone form for a moment, as if? -..«mining something he had stepped in, and then brought down the

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sole of a size-thirteen brothel creeper. Junior howled, his eyes bulging.

The Teds were first to attack, sweeping into the Dogs with the practised fury of their warrior tribe and driving the Dogs back into the road, forcing a milk float to swerve and a crate of gold-top to fall off the back and shatter. But the Dogs quickly rallied, all those away matches on the terraces behind them, accustomed to scrapping on uneven ground, soon finding their footing on the spilt milk and broken glass beneath their boots.

Leon crawled away on his hands and knees, surrounded by flying DMs and brothel creepers, through the puddles of blood and milk and glass, with Mrs Thatcher's bossy, ingratiating voice still ringing in his ears.

'… swamped… swamped… swamped by people with a different culture…'

Up and on his feet, he jumped on the platform of a passing bus, the pole almost ripping his arm out of its socket. Ignoring the protests of the conductor he went upstairs, staring out of the rear window, dabbing at the cut above his eyebrow, looking back at the gang fight that had now sprawled right across the road receding behind him.

The Dogs had staged an impressive comeback, but the superior fighting ability of the Teds was proving decisive. Titch had two of the Dagenham Dogs by the scruff of the neck, and Leon watched him bang their heads together as if they were cymbals. Junior was crawling away, now with real tears on his face. He disappeared under a pack of Teds. Then the bus took a left on to Blackfriars Bridge and the fight was gone.

The bus crossed the river and Leon stared at the dome of St Paul's without seeing it. He was pale-faced and shaking with an emotion that threatened to overwhelm him.

'Swamped… swamped… swamped… we are not in politics to ignore people's worries… we are in politics to deal with them.' Shaking because he had just narrowly escaped a good hiding. And because he had just seen the future.

FOURTEEN

There was no real traffic.

A young man at the wheel of a Ford Capri could get up a real head of steam as he headed south to the river - barrelling down the long sweep of Regent Street, taking a sharp left round Eros at Piccadilly Circus, then down Haymarket, and almost one long straight run all the way to the Embankment. 'Can you slow down a bit?' Misty said.

Terry swerved to miss a Lotus Elan. 'Had enough excitement for one night?'

He increased his speed, zipping through a red light. There was a rage inside him. In a way it would have been a lot easier if Misty and Dag had been fucking their brains out. Then it would have been simple. Then it would have been over.

But what do you do when your girlfriend has spent the night talking about Nietzsche, Byron and the first Doors album with another man? Terry didn't know quite what to do. Increasingly, he felt that way - life was more complicated than he had ever imagined, and he was struggling to keep up.

'Will you slow down', she said, with that cold edge of steel that she could always summon up at will. 'This is not even your car'. 'What's your old man going to do? Sue me?'

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'Terry,' she said. 'Oh, Terry.' A long sigh. 'You really don't get it, do you?' So she said it very slowly, as if she was light years ahead of him. 'I'm having a baby.'

He stared at her, wondering if this was a joke, or a trick, or a lie, but she was looking straight ahead through the windscreen of her daddy's car, and in an instant it all made sense.

He remembered the pills on the first night. The pills she could no longer take, and he remembered their cavalier attitude to contraception, the blithe disregard of a pair of rutting youngsters.

They had briefly contemplated condoms, but packets of three seemed so ridiculously Fifties that they had ended up laughing at the very idea. Condoms went out with banana rations, Billy Fury and the hula-hoop.

They had been banging away for months, and because nothing happened they had believed that it never would. And then it did. And now it had. A baby. He hadn't even thought about it. The possibility had never crossed his mind. It seemed like the stuff of some other, grown-up life. A baby.

She screamed just then and Terry turned his head in time to see a police car stopping to let an old lady in a Morris Minor out of a side road. He slammed on the brakes, and then practically stood on them, almost rising out of the seat, and the cop car was hurtling towards them in a rush of shrieking rubber and Misty shouting. Terry held his breath, waiting for the mangling of metal and glass, tears in his eyes. A baby, he thought. A little baby. The crash never came. The Ford Capri screamed to a halt inches from the bumper of the law. The tyres howling, the two cops already turning in their seats to see what kind of maniac had almost driven up their backsides.

Terry sat at the wheel, gasping for breath, trying to take it all in - a baby - and watching the policemen get out of their car and start walking towards him. He knew he was going to be stopped and searched. And he knew there was no time to hide the drugs he was carrying. He looked at Misty and laughed. A baby. A cop stuck his head in Terry's window. There was an old one and a young one, just like at the airport.

They made him get out of the car. Then they breathalysed him, telling him to blow harder, to blow properly. It was neutral. Then they made him empty his pockets, and one of them read his driving licence while the other patted him down. The cellophane bag of amphetamine sulphate was in the ticket pocket of his dead man's jacket. And they missed it.

'Sir,' said the younger one, 'may I ask why you are driving like such a fucking cunt?'

Terry shook his head. The world seemed to have changed. He couldn't put it into words, but it seemed like the world had changed for ever. Or at least his little part of it.

T just found out I'm going to be a dad,' he said. He let the words settle, fill the space between them. The cops looked at each other. T took my eyes off the road - took my eyes off the road for a few seconds there.'

The two cops dipped their heads to take a look at Misty, all demure and blonde in the passenger seat, and then they looked back at Terry.

'She's a lovely lass,' said the older cop, holding out his hand. 'Congratulations.'

The younger cop slapped Terry on the back. 'I remember when my missus told me about our first,' he laughed, as the old cop crushed Terry's fingers. 'I nearly choked on me Rice Krispies.'

Then both of the policemen were smiling and laughing and patting Terry on the back, and they went off feeling slightly better about the world, or maybe young people. As if, Terry thought, they had just learned that the younger generation were really no different to all those who had gone before, despite their strange hair and clothes from Oxfam. And maybe they were right.

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But Terry watched Misty's impassive face with a sinking feeling, as something occurred to him for the first time. What if she didn't want this baby? They parked up on a side street and sat by Cleopatra's Needle, watching the boats on the river, the tower block containing The Paper the tallest building on the skyline. 'We're young,' she said. 'Young to have a baby.'

'That's true,' he said. There was no bad feeling between them now. There was only this bond, this incredible bond between them, as though they were more than lovers, and more than friends. As though they could never be this close to anyone else. 'It's a big responsibility,' she said. 'I know,' he said. 'It's a huge responsibility. A baby. Jesus.'

Misty bristled. 'And I'm not going to be one of those mothers who stays home making jam or whatever the fuck they do all day.' He laughed with genuine amusement. 'That's for sure.'

Misty relaxed. 'But it doesn't have to change anything,' she said, excited now, and it allowed Terry to be excited too. 'And what a great experience - to bring another human life into the world.'

They were laughing together now. 'Imagine what it will look like, Misty. A little bit of you, and a little bit of me. All mixed up.'

Then she was suddenly all serious again. T don't want to get rid of it, Terry. I don't want an abortion. Of course I'm pro a woman's right to choose and everything, but I just don't want to get rid of it.'

He shook his head. 'No,' he said, 'no, that would be awful.' He already loved their baby.

Then they were both quiet for a while. Something magical had settled on the day, and they sat there by the river, feeling it, trying to understand what it all meant. Their baby.

'It doesn't have to change anything at all,' Misty said, trying to work out how things would be. 'We can take it with us. When we work. When we go to gigs.' Terry thought about it, furrowing his brow. Concentrating. Trying to be a responsible dad. 'Maybe we should put some cotton wool in its little ears. To protect them while they're still, you know, growing.'

Misty nodded thoughtfully. 'That's a really good idea. Cotton wool for its ears.' She laughed, and her face seemed to light up. 'What if it's a girl?'

Terry laughed too, and he took Misty's hands and kissed them. 'What if it's a boy?'

Then they were both silent for the longest while, letting it all sink in, watching the boats on the river without really seeing them, and feeling the heat of the sun as it came up on their adult lives. Leon held the second bacon sandwich in his hands, savouring the moment.

Against all odds, he had somehow contrived to meet the girl of his dreams, review the band of his nightmares, and avoid the kicking of a lifetime. Not a bad night, all in all.

After fleeing the battle between the Teddy Boys and the Dagenham Dogs, he had jumped off the bus at London Wall in the heart of the financial district, which was already filling up with men in suits and their young female helpers. Leon walked among them, thinking -what was it that Engels said about the relationship of men and women in the nuclear farmly? Something about man being the bourgeois and his wife the proletariat. Well, Friedrich, my old mate, Leon thought, it's exactly the same in the City of London.

Unable to face eating a bacon sandwich so close to the heart of capitalism, Leon walked east to Charterhouse Street and the Smithfield meat market, deciding that he would prefer to eat his breakfast in a cafe full of real workers, not a bunch of chinless paper pushers sipping their weak tea and nibbling their cheese-and-Branston toasties.

Terry had taken him here once, when he was trying to borrow money from his father, and Leon had been much taken by the place. Almost in the shadow of the Bank of England and the Stock

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Exchange, a market of sweating, shouting men toiled through the night with animal carcasses as big as they were, and then went off to sink pints of beer and nosh enormous fry-ups in the countless greasy spoons and smoky pubs surrounding Smithfield before staggering off home to collapse in bed. That's the place to be, Leon thought, trying not to touch the bloody scab on his forehead.

The market was winding down now, and the small cafe Leon chose was full of porters in filthy white coats tucking into plates piled high with fried eggs, bacon, beans, sausages and toast.

Good, honest working men at the end of their labours, Leon thought warmly - real people! - although of course he deplored the way they leered over young women displaying their pert young breasts in the tabloid newspapers. He paused with the sandwich halfway to his lips, as his eyes drifted to the paper of the man next to him, and the girlish smile above the womanly body of Mandy, sixteen, from Kent. It made him remember the heartbreaking springiness of Ruby's body inside the sleeping bag, and he felt himself stir with love and longing. He wondered if he would see her at the weekend. He wondered if he would ever see her again. He wondered if he could compete with Steve.

Leon put the bacon sandwich back on its plate and murmured an apology as he reached across an elderly porter for the HP sauce. He pulled back the top layer of bread on his sandwich and considered the bacon, fried to a crispy brown, nestling on butter that had already melted into the thick slice of Mother's Pride. His tummy rumbled, ravenous after the exertions of the night, and his mouth flooded with saliva and hunger.

Then he shook the sauce bottle as hard as he possibly could and - as the top was merely resting rather than screwed on - a projectile of thick brown sauce shot into the air like something hurled into space out of Cape Canaveral. It came down on the table directly behind Leon and from the shocked intake of breath all around the cafe, he knew the landing place wasn't good news.

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Leon turned to see a meat porter with violence in his eyes and HP sauce on his shaven head. He was as broad as he was wide and the muscles in his arms were thick and knotted from a quarter-century of heavy lifting.

Leon could see the muscles in his arms quite clearly because,.is the man rose from his seat, making no attempt to wipe away (he HP sauce that was dripping into his eyes, he was rolling up the sleeves of his blood-splattered white coat.

And that was when Leon Peck stopped worrying quite so much about the workers. Terry's father was an old man now.

Terry watched him coming down the street from the window of their front room, coming home from the night shift, and he looked like he was dragging the weight of the years behind him.

Worn out by work, worn out with worry about his son, worn out by the unforgiving toll of the years. An old man at forty or lifty or whatever he was.

Terry's mum smiled at her son as they heard the key in the lock. She indicated that they should all be very quiet, all three of them. And then the old man was standing in the doorway, still in his white coat and his French Foreign Legion hat, blinking at his wife and his son and his son's girlfriend, young Misty.

'Guess what?' Terry's mum said, as if she had been saving this up for a long time. 'Guess what, Granddad?'

Yes, his father looked ancient these days. But when he heard i he news and it had started to sink in, that kind, exhausted face hi up with a smile, and it was a smile that Terry knew would last I he old man for years. I 'I i e editor's office was crowded but the only sound was the metallic limp of a spool on Terry's tape recorder and the singsong voice of John Lennon. 'I've been through a lot of trips - macrobiotics, Maharishi, the

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Bible… all them gurus tell you is - Remember this moment now. You Are Here.'

The editor swooned. It was the kind of moment that Kevin White lived for. Everybody would go crazy when they heard this stuff. The Fleet Street boys would be banging at the door.

'The break-up of the band… the death of Brian, the selling-out of Paul… Ringo makes the best solo records…'

Kevin White thumbed through Ray's handwritten notes, shaking his head, a slow smile spreading across his face. Lennon kept talking. He was the great talker. And he seemed to have this need to get it all out, to get it all down, to confess to everything. He was the great confessor, talking about the whole mad trip as if for the first time, as if for the last time.

'We were pretty greasy… outside of Liverpool, when we went down south in our leather outfits, the dance-hall promoters didn't really like us… they thought we looked like a gang of thugs. So it got to be like Epstein said, "Look, if you wear a suit…" And everybody wanted a good suit, you know, Ray? A nice, sharp, black suit, man… We liked the leather and the jeans, but we wanted a good suit to wear off-stage. "Yeah, man, I'll have a suit." Brian was our salesman, our front. You'll notice that another quirk of life is -1 may have read this somewhere - that self-made men usually have someone with education to front for them, to deal with all the other people with education… You want another tea? You sure?'

'You know what you've got here, don't you, Ray?' White said. 'A world exclusive.' Ray nodded, smiling weakly. He was suddenly spent. He felt like he could sleep for a thousand years. He wished he were curled up under clean white sheets with her - with Mrs Brown, although he no longer thought of her as Mrs Brown. Now she was Liz - her parents had been to see Elizabeth Taylor in National Velvet on their first date - because now she was no longer just some other man's wife, because that was her name. Liz. It was a good name for her. And then there was Yoko. 'I'm not somebody who wants to burn the Mona Lisa. That's the great difference between some revolutionaries and me. They think you have to burn the Establishment. I'm not. I'm saying make the Mona Lisa into something like a shirt. Change the value of it.' 'Turn the Mona Lisa into a shirt,' White chuckled. T love it.'

Was it a good interview? Ray couldn't tell. Turning the Mona Lisa into a shirt - that was just mindless babble, wasn't it? That was plain nutty. But it had happened. That was the important thing. And in the end it had all been so easy. And everyone had been so nice. And with hindsight it seemed perfectly natural to walk up to the biggest rock star in the world, introduce yourself, and then sit down and have a talk. That world of shared feelings -John Lennon believed in it too.

Ray Keeley had approached John Lennon with love in his eyes -a supplicant, a fan, a true believer. How could his hero refuse him? And Lennon was kind. He was more kind than he had to be.

'It can't be the cover,' said one of the older guys, unable to keep the resentment out of his voice.

Kevin White had been treating Ray like the prodigal son ever since he turned up with his Lennon interview, but the older guys seemed curiously put out, as though Ray had got something over them.

The editor nodded. 'Any other week it would be the cover,' White said, almost apologetically. 'This week - well, there's only one cover.'

T was thinking Elvis in '56,' said one of the older guys, tapping a pencil on his pad. 'One of the classic Alfred Wertheimer shots. The Memphis Flash in all his pomp. Headline - REMEMBER HIM THIS WAY. Italicise the "This".' White nodded thoughtfully.

'Yesterday Elvis was a fat embarrassment who went on twenty years too long,' he said. 'Never the same after he joined the army, blah blah blah. Today he's a rock-and-roll martyr, a cultural god, immortal. And taken from us far too soon.' 'That's cruel,' Ray said.

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'That's showbiz,' sneered one of the older guys. The tape played on. 'Our gimmick is that we're a living Romeo and Juliet. And you know, the great thing about us influencing in this way, is that everybody's a couple. We're all living in pairs. And if all the couples in the world identify with us and our ideas go through them, what percentage of the population is that?' 'Er…' Ray flinched at the sound of his own awkward voice. 'You know what you've got here, don't you?' White said to him, laying a loving hand on the tape recorder. 'A job for life. A job for life. You're the writer who interviewed John Lennon in the middle of the Summer of Hate.' White smiled proudly at Ray, as if he had never stopped believing in him. 'You're going to be getting free records when you're forty. Think about it.' Ray could sense every eye in the room on him, and he could feel their envy. It was what they all wanted - it was what he had wanted at the start of the night. The promise that the circus would never leave town without him. Perhaps it was just nervous exhaustion, but he didn't feel as happy as he'd thought he would. Free records at forty… Why did the idea depress him? This was the only job that he had ever wanted, because it had never felt like a job. And yet the prospect of growing middle-aged within these walls filled him with dread. Maybe it was that he needed to sleep now, needed it urgendy. Or perhaps it was because his generation, and the one that came before, had made such a big fucking deal about being young that the thought of growing old was unthinkable. Even if you still got free records when you were forty.

'Life's too short,' said John Lennon, and then there was a click as the cassette ran out. 'Life's too short,' and then he was gone.

Then White's secretary was bursting into the room, and she was doing something that you were never meant to do in the office of The Paper, where beyond everything else, you were expected to be cool.

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She was crying. 'It's Skip,' she said. There were green shoots pushing through the crushed rubble of Covent Garden, like the promise of a better season, or possibly an early warning of chaos ahead, all the old wildness breaking through.

No, thought Terry Warboys. Call it a better season. That's what you have to believe.

He was standing outside the Western World. It looked so different in the daylight. Little more than a hole in the wall, the extinguished neon sign bleak and filthy. It looked as though it had been closed for years, not a few hours.

Suddenly Terry was aware that there was a crumpled figure curled up in the doorway. His red, white and blue jacket was in tatters now. He blinked at Terry as if he had just emerged from some enchanted sleep. 'Is that it?' Brainiac said. 'Yeah,' Terry nodded. 'I think that's it, Brian.'

Terry was nostalgic for this place already. He thought about the nights he had gone through those doors and down into a cellar full of sound, the speed pumping in his veins, the faces of old friends and beautiful strangers coming out of the darkness.

Misty had gone on ahead to The Paper to deliver some shots of Dag Wood to the picture desk, and that was fine because Terry needed time to think. Before everything was different.

Misty said that the baby would change nothing. Terry suspected that the baby would change everything. But what would never change, he thought as he stood outside the Western World, was the way he felt about his girl. He would never stop wanting her, and the baby would make the bond between them even stronger. Everything else would have to take second place.

He knew he wouldn't be coming to the Western World quite as often as he had in the past. It wasn't just the audience that was changing, as word of the new music and the good times to be had

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spread out to the council estates and the suburbs and the faraway towns. The groups were changing too.

Bands were like sharks - they kept moving or died. You couldn't play a place like the Western World for ever. He looked at the fly posters for coming attractions and he realised he didn't know any of these bands, and he wasn't particularly interested in knowing them.

The bands he had started out with were on their way. Last year there had been a real camaraderie - the days of amphetamines and new friendships and a whole world opening up. Everybody escaping from their own private gin factory. Now it was all capped teeth, cocaine and bodyguards. The bands he had known and loved were either getting left behind or they were becoming famous, and struggling to remain famous, and they were changing. And Terry was changing too.

He took out the bag of amphetamine sulphate that the police search had failed to find in the ticket pocket of his dead man's jacket. Then he tossed it as far as he could on to the wasteland that faced the Western World.

Brainiac looked up, sniffing the air, and then abruptly lost interest.

It seemed to Terry that the thing they had come here for had been better a year ago. During that blazing summer when it was all just getting started. They couldn't wait for that time to be gone, and for their real lives to begin.

But he saw now that was it - that was the special time, when you could walk into a club and hear the Clash playing 'London's Burning' or the Jam playing 'Away from the Numbers' or Johnny Thunders and the Heartbreakers doing 'Chinese Rocks', and you knew that you were in exactly the right place, the centre of the universe, and you could go out every night of the week and see a great band, a great band who didn't even have a recording contract, and you could take home a girl whose name you wouldn't remember in the morning, and there wasn't just one girl who you couldn't live without. That brief period when he had been Norman Mailer's free man in Paris.

He had not appreciated how good it all was at the time. Or maybe it was always like that, and you only noticed happiness when it was past. They all had more now - the bands had recording contracts, the writers had careers, and he had the girl he had always wanted from the moment he first saw her.

And yet somehow it felt like nobody was quite as happy as they were a year ago. There was a fragment of poetry running around his head, a snatch of someone - Larkin? - from an English Lit class of five or six years ago when he had been watching the clouds drifting over the playing fields and only half listening. And now he saw that the poem was about him. He married a woman to stop her getting away Now she's there all day.

Terry watched Brainiac slowly get to his feet and stumble across the wasteland of Covent Garden, a forlorn figure wearing what appeared to be a ragged old flag. The builders had started work for the day. They were cementing over their beloved bombsite. All this was going to change. Everything.

The sun had come up on a different world and Terry couldn't ran around like a dumb kid any more. He loved their baby already. Yet it brought him down to think that he would never again go out watching bands with his head full of chemicals and ready for anything. It brought him down hard.

But he stopped outside a bakery on Neal Street, bought a bag full of bagels and started walking south, his fingers and teeth tearing greedily into the hot white bread, the smell the best smell in the world, his stomach rumbling with protest but somehow remembering what food tasted like, and by the time he reached the river and the bag of fresh bagels was gone, Terry was aware that he was smiling.

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FIFTEEN

Terry burst into the review room full of news for Skip - about fatherhood, about how your life could change in a night, about revenge being a dish best served with laxatives.

But instead of Skip he found Misty drinking vending-machine tea with a tall, middle-aged lady. She looked kind and pretty and Terry felt that he had seen her somewhere before.

'This is Skip's mother,' Misty said, taking a quick, concerned glance at the woman. 'Skip - Skip's not very well'

Terry shook his head, not understanding. These were still the days when he thought they were all going to live for ever. 'What happened to him?' 'He's in the hospital,' Misty said. 'They think he's had a stroke.'

The woman seemed to bow her head towards her plastic cup of tea. Terry stared wildly at Misty. He didn't know what she was talking about. He didn't understand anything. 'A stroke? What's that - like a heart attack?' Misty took a breath.

'The ambulancemen said it could be a cerebral haemorrhage,' Misty said. 'Bleeding from a weakened artery getting into the brain. If he survives the first week or two, he'll be fine.' Terry took a step towards them, and words failed him. It was shocking enough to discover that Skip had a mum. The thought of his friend and hero dying was beyond his imagination.

How could your own body betray you like this? How could it just happen without warning? Where was the justice? Who could you complain to?

T wouldn't be here without Skip,' he said, and it sounded pathetically inadequate to convey his feelings - who cared if he was here or not? What did it matter to anybody? But the woman smiled and nodded. 'The boss wants to see you,' Misty said. 'The pair of you.'

Terry turned and saw Leon standing in the doorway, pale-faced with shock and lack of sleep. One of his eyes was half-closed and purple. There was a black scab of blood on his forehead. And his hair was golden.

Terry took Leon's arm and stepped outside the review room, looking at his friend anxiously. 'Jesus, Leon - what happened to you?'

T went dancing,' Leon said, and Terry had to smile. He gave Leon a shove and felt the mad, inappropriate laughter bubbling up inside him. 'You went dancing, did you?' 'Yeah, I went dancing.' Leon was smiling now. 'Did the Dogs catch up with you?' Leon's smile grew wider. 'No, the Teds caught up with them.'

Terry nodded with satisfaction. 'And what about Skip? What's going to happen to Skip?'

T don't know,' Leon said, tearing up. Terry placed a hand on his shoulder.

'Skip will be all right,' he said. 'He has to be. He's only - how old is Skip anyway?'

Leon bent his head, and for a moment it seemed to Terry as if his friend was not thinking about the question but about the articles they had all grown up reading - Skip Jones telling them about his adventures with Keith Richards and Iggy Pop and Dag Wood

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and Lou Reed and Jimmy Page and the New York Dolls, Skip's hard-earned wisdom and reckless appetites somehow co-existing, Skip ripping apart the pretentious, celebrating the good stuff in that cool, pristine prose. Terry watched Leon thinking about Skip, and he knew that Skip was a better writer than he would ever be. 'Skip's twenty-five,' Leon said.

They walked the short distance to Kevin White's office. White was staring out of the window at the traffic on the river. Ray was standing beside him. They turned when Terry knocked on the open door. White gestured for them to enter, and Ray smiled, and as they walked in Terry remembered the last time the three of them had been together, hiding from the Teds in that destroyed building at the start of the night. A lifetime ago.

'Boss, the three of us are going to the hospital,' Terry said. 'We've got to see Skip.'

White shook his head impatiently. 'Don't worry about Skip,' he said. 'They're taking good care of Skip. He's going to be all right. And we've got a big issue to get out.'

'A big issue?' Terry said. 'A big issue? Skip's in the hospital with a cerebral whatever-the-fuck-it-is, and you're talking about a big issue?'

White said nothing, just looking at them, letting the silence fill the room. When he eventually spoke his voice was very quiet.

'You boys are getting a little long in the tooth for this teenage-rebel stuff, aren't you?' he said, looking at Terry like he was a greaser on Brighton beach on a Bank Holiday Monday in 1965. T heard about the stunt you pulled at the Hotel Blanc' Terry said nothing, but something in White's eyes made him look at his feet. He hated it when White was angry with him. The editor let his voice get softer. 'In future don't bring your personal problems to work. Okay?' Terry nodded. 'Okay.'

White looked at Leon. 'And God only knows where you were last night.' 'I went dancing,' Leon said, but his editor didn't crack a smile. 'Look at the state of you,' White said, shaking his head.

'But -1 thought we were meant to be wild,' Leon said. T thought we were meant to be a rock-and-roll paper.' He could feel his argument gaining momentum. T thought - I thought that's what it's all about!'

Terry noticed that White's desk was covered with pictures of the young Elvis Presley. And he saw for the first time that Elvis had been beautiful.

'You think that's what it's all about, Leon?' White was saying. 'Coming into work looking like you've been up all night, playing in the traffic? Maybe once. Maybe rock and roll was about being young and wild - once. But look at you two,' he said, nodding towards Leon and Terry. 'Now it's just an excuse to never grow up.' 'Whatever happened to anarchy?' Leon said.

'Yeah,' chimed in Terry, wanting to stick up for his friend, willing to risk incurring the editor's wrath. 'I thought anarchy was all the rage.'

But White just smiled at them. 'Don't make me laugh,' he said. 'If Johnny Rotten was a real anarchist he would be sitting in a pub in Pinsbury Park with his thumb up his arse. He wouldn't be signing a recording contract with Richard Branson.' The editor shook his head with exasperation. He was almost thirty years old and tired of all this crap. Terry could see it. He was tired of arguing with them. 'You boys are going to have to decide if you're serious about what we do up here, or if you're just happy amateurs. Because there's no place for happy amateurs in the music industry any more. If that's what you want, go write a fanzine.'

'Boss, you're talking like some old businessman,' Leon said quietly. He did not want to row with White. He loved him. 'But I know it's more than that to you. I know you care about the music. I know you care about The Paper. I know you do.' Leon smiled triumphantly. 'You're just like us.'

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'The times have changed,' White said, and Terry thought their editor looked more tired than any of them. 'We're not one step away from the underground press any more. This is a business. We have advertisers, management, subscribers - all that grownup shit. I had them in here last night, the fucking suits -complaining about drug use, about loud music, about all these journalists swanning around like they're in a band. Complaining about you lot. There's no such thing as a free festival. Not any more. That's why, when he's better, Skip's going to take extended leave.' The three of them were stunned. 'Skip's not coming back?' Terry said.

'Skip needs a rest,' White said. 'A long rest.' Terry and Leon looked at each other. Ray let his hair fall over his eyes. 'Look - I know you love Skip. So do I. Of course I do. Who gave him his first proper job? Who kept him on when he was frightening the old ladies on Country Matters? But Skip couldn't go on like that for ever. Trying to keep up with Keith Richards? Going cold turkey in the review room? You think the men in suits don't notice this stuff?'

T can't believe Skip's not going to be around,' Terry said, looking at Ray. But Ray's face betrayed nothing. It was as if he had already had everything explained to him by the editor. Terry watched his friend brush the hair out of his face.

'You know what it's going to be soon?' White said. 'It's going to be the Eighties. Think about it.' Terry thought about it. But he couldn't imagine the Eighties. They were unimaginable. Then White was grinning like a loon, happy for the first time, jerking a thumb at Ray. 'Guess who this guy interviewed for us?'

Terry and Leon stared at Ray for a moment and then they were all over him, slapping him on the back and laughing together and congratulating him.

'So Ray's going to be writing Lennon for the new issue,' White said. 'Terry, what are you doing for us?' Terry played for time. He hadn't given any thought to what he would be writing for the new issue. 'Well - thought I might talk to Billy Blitzen. Get him to -'

'Forget it,' White interrupted. 'That's all over. Everybody's tired of the noble junkie thing. It's all played out, and the music is just too bad. I'll tell you what you're doing - you're doing the singles this week and then I'm sending you up to Sheffield next week. The Sewer Rats are on the road. Take Misty with you. Tell her to get plenty of pictures of the Dogs going mental and smashing the place up.'

Terry said nothing, but his face said it all. About the Sewer Rats, about the Dagenham Dogs, about Misty being around the likes of them.

White nodded, as if agreeing with him. 'Want me to get somebody else?' he said evenly.

Terry realised that the days of writing about his friends were over. 'No, I've got it,' he said. 'Good,' White said. 'What about me?' Leon said.

White searched through some papers on his desk until he found what he was looking for. Leon recognised it as his review.

'Leni and the Riefenstahls at the Red Cow,' White said, nodding thoughtfully. 'Good gig?'

Leon shrugged. 'The usual. Kraftwerk for dummies. It's all in the piece, boss. Not really my cup of poison.'

'Good piece, Leon,' White said. 'Funny, abusive - exactly the right word length. And you got it in on time. Well done.'

Leon beamed. One word of praise from Kevin White, and all of them felt their spirits soar. 'Thanks, boss.'

'Except it never happened,' White said, and Leon felt his heart sink to his boots. 'Leni called in sick. She had root canal treatment yesterday afternoon.' The editor dropped the review in the bin and brushed his hands. White looked at Leon. 'They didn't play the Red Cow last night.'

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Ray and Terry were staring at Leon, suddenly aware of their breathing. They knew that there was no right of appeal. You could do almost anything in the offices of The Paper. But if you reviewed a gig that never happened, and you got caught, then you cleared your desk. And then you walked away.

'Sorry, Leon,' White said sadly. 'You've written some good stuff for us. I'll make sure you get all the references you need.'

Terry put his arm around Leon and said nothing. He saw the tears fill his friend's eyes and dug his fingers into his shoulder blade. Terry saw the shock on Ray's face. Leon hung his head.

There was a soft knock on the door. A thin boy with a red fringe drooping over huge, heavily made-up eyes glided into the room, carrying a fistful of typed pages. He was younger than all of them. Even younger than Ray.

'The think piece you wanted,' he said to White, smiling brightly. 'Berlin's influence on Bowie, and Bowie's influence on everyone.' When the painted youth had gone, Terry stared at the editor. 'Who the fucking hell is that little bender?' he said. 'That's the new guy,' the editor said. The three of them sat in Trevi, drinking endless cups of tea, and Terry and Ray stole glances at Leon, not knowing what to say. When one of them moved his feet, he could feel the cardboard box under the table containing the contents of Leon's desk. It had never crossed their minds. That one day there would be an end to it.

Leon felt he should say something. It was like being in the Goldmine when Elvis died and there had been that horrible cheering. He just had to say something. He wondered where he got it from, this urge to say something. He wondered if it was from his father.

T just - you know,' he stuttered, T just want to say - it's been great.' His eyes filled up again. 'The best thing in my life. Being at The Paper. And working with you two…' Ray bit his lip, staring hard into his tea. But Terry slapped his hand on the table, glaring at Leon.

'Bullshit,' he said angrily. 'Don't give me this Vera Lynn we'll-meet-again bullshit - this doesn't change a thing, Leon - you going - it doesn't! Terry sniffed, wiped his eyes with dirty fingers. 'Do you know what today's going to be?' He smiled wildly. 'Today's going to be the best day ever. The best day ever.'

Terry took a gulp of tea and laid out the plan. Soon Ray, and finally Leon, were joining in. They didn't feel the need to talk about it, but it was quite clear - they were not going to let Leon's sacking put an end to what would be the last great friendship of their lives.

They would spend the morning in Rough Trade, looking at the new records and fanzines and talking to the two guys who ran the place about new music. Then maybe in the afternoon they would go over to Rehearsal Rehearsal in Camden Town, where they all knew Terry, and where maybe Subway Sect or the Clash would be practising, and everybody would talk at once, about music and politics and girls, and there would be a lot of bitching about other bands and other music papers, and there would be speed and spliffs for those who wanted them, and Skol and Red Stripe for everybody, and it would feel just like it felt at the start. At one point they might even have something to eat, to make up for all the meals they had missed. And when the night came they would be spoilt for choice.

Terry spread the live pages of The Paper out before them. He looked up at Leon and they smiled at each other. Terry gave him a shove and laughed. 'Look at this lot,' he said.

Dag Wood was at the Rainbow in Finsbury Park. That would be interesting, especially if Dag had really saved Skip's laxatives for the show. And Elvis Costello was at the Nashville Room, on the corner of the Cromwell Road and North End Road, tickets Ј1. Eddie and the Hot Rods were at the Marquee - Ј1 on the door, Ј1.20 for members - Slaughter and the Dogs were at the Roxy,

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41-43 Neal Street, Covent Garden - support act the Varicose Veins. The Tom Robinson Band were at the Hope amp; Anchor on Upper Street, Islington. And the Sex Pistols were on a secret tour -no billing, no advertising - and they had just played a date at the Lafayette, Wolverhampton, and kids were writing to The Paper complaining about the exorbitant Ј1.50 entrance fee. There were rumours the Pistols were going to play the Screen on the Green again in the early hours of the morning. 'So what do you want to see?' Ray said.

'Let's see all of it,' Terry said. Leon laughed, watching the pair of them working out their schedule, thinking about the logistics of doing it all, and he loved them like the brothers he had never had.

T reckon we could just about do it all,' Ray said. 'Although we might have to miss the Varicose Veins set at the Roxy.'

'That new guy,' Terry said, making a jerking motion with his right fist, and Leon's heart flooded with gratitude. 'Give me a break. The whole Bowie thing has been done to death.'

Leon stared at the table. It didn't have much to do with him any more. The small cardboard box between his feet reminded him that he was out. He felt like something had gone wrong that he would never be able to put right. But he thought about the day to come and his mood lifted.

Then Misty came in. Leon could see she wanted to talk to Terry alone, and after a few uncomfortable moments Terry slipped outside with her, and then one of the older guys was there, oddly respectful, needing to speak to Ray about his piece on Lennon so they could start laying it out, and Leon said go ahead, don't mind me, and Leon sipped his tea while Ray talked to the older guy about the Lennon story, and Leon knew in his heart that, as much as they wanted to be with him for the best day ever, his friends had other places they needed to be.

The older guy left and Terry came back without Misty, but somehow the thing they called the vibe had changed. They paid the bill and left. They no longer talked about the day to come. Outside the cafe they paused, the wind whipping around the tower as it always did, as if urging them to move on. Misty was at the wheel of her father's car, parked on a zebra crossing, engine running, the sound of Radio One blaring from the car's open windows. The DJ was saying that Elvis was going to sell two million records in the first twenty-four hours after his death. They were calling it his best day ever.

'It's too bad this is such a busy week,' Ray said apologetically. 'It's just a big issue, that's all'

'It's fine,' Leon said. He didn't want them to feel bad. He didn't want them to make a big deal about it. He couldn't stand it if they were too kind. 'I'll call you, okay?'

'We can do it another day,' Terry said. 'We've got all the time in the world. Right?'

Terry hugged Leon and then he let him go, pushing him away with a rough shove. Ray placed a shy hand on Leon's Lewis Leather. Leon tried to smile. The three of them looked at each other for a moment, uncertain what would happen next. Then suddenly a few bars of Colonel Bogie blared from a car horn. They all turned to look at Misty, waiting at the wheel of the Capri. She smiled and waved, anxious to get moving. 'So your dad's not really a lawyer then?' Terry said.

They were sitting in her father's car outside her home, which turned out to be a council house on a hill overlooking the ripped backside of King's Cross.

The front yard - it may once have been a garden - was buried under spare car parts. A couple of blackened exhausts, a grease-smeared engine, a solitary passenger seat, the rusty carcass of an old Mini Cooper, its wheels gone. The sound of trains filled the air like birdsong.

'A lawyer wouldn't drive a Ford Capri,' Misty said absent-mindedly. Then she looked at Terry with what he felt was infinite tenderness. 'You don't know anything, do you?'

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It was true. He was so easy to fool. Here he was, about to become a father, and he didn't know anything. But he was learning. "What does he do, then?' Terry said. 'Your old man?'

For some reason he half-expected her to say - exactly the same as your old man. He half-expected her to say - he's a porter at Smithfield. We are exactly the same, and we have been exactly the same all along. But instead she said, 'He's a mechanic. Self-employed. A small businessman.'

He thought about it for a while. Everything he had believed about her - the home full of Bach and books, the life of easy privilege, an upbringing of skiing trips and pony clubs - needed to be rethought. Many of the things that he had liked about her were receding fast.

'Where does it come from?' he said. He wondered what you would call it. 'This invented life.'

Misty sighed. 'Cosmopolitan, I guess. All those beautiful people living beautiful lives. And the Sunday Times - especially the magazine, the colour supplement. And then all the people I met in the sixth form, after my real friends had left at fifteen.' She nodded thoughtfully. And then the people I met at The Paper.' He still didn't get it. 'But you didn't have to lie to me.'

She laughed. 'Of course I did. I didn't do it for you, or anyone else. I did it for myself. I lied so that I would feel more comfortable. Do you want to go inside? And meet them?'

He took her hands. 'But I don't want us to lie any more. Not if we're going to have a baby. Not if we're going to do this thing properly.'

Misty contemplated the scrap metal littering the front yard. 'Maybe only if we lie for a very good reason,' she said finally. 'Maybe only if we lie because we don't want to hurt the other one.' She smiled, running her fingers down the curve of his face. 'That's what marriage is all about,' she told him. Misty's father laughed and clapped Terry on the back. 'You've had your fun and now you've got to pay for it,' he announced.

He was a large man in a vest, a thick mat of monkey hair on his broad back, and he poured two shots of Famous Grouse into filthy glasses. Ignoring Terry's mumbled objections, he forced a glass into his hand. T know how you feel - her mum was four months gone when we tied the knot.' He raised a glass. 'Down the hatch.'

Terry followed his lead and threw back the whisky, feeling it burn a path all the way down to his Doctor Martens. His head was whirling. Everywhere in the shabby little house there were images of Jesus and Mary. It felt like they were in every alcove, on the wall, all over the mantelpiece. Christ writhing on the cross, Mary's hands together in prayer. All these images of suffering and purity. Terry placed a hand on his sweating forehead, felt the whisky working its dark magic.

'You're a lucky bastard,' her father gasped, wiping his mouth on the back of a hairy hand.'My wife's brothers gave me the biding of a lifetime, even though I was always planning to do the righl thing.' He waved a glass at the three sullen males contemplating Terry from the sofa. Misty's brothers, two bigger, one smaller. Vicious brutes, the lot of them, thought Terry.

'Seems like you're getting off lightly,' her dad said. Then he got down to business. 'I can get you and Mary the Scout hall on the cheap for the reception.' Terry thought - Mary?

And I know someone at the local Westminster Wine who will do the booze and then you and Mary can move in here with us until the council sort you out a nice little flat.'

It was all worked out. Tears sprung to Terry's eyes. It was partly the Famous Grouse, and it was partly the shock of learning the truth about Misty's family, and it was partly that he had been up all night taking drugs and having adventures. But mostly it was the feeling that his life had suddenly been taken away from him.

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This family wasn't like his own. His mother would have gone mental if someone had knocked over a garden gnome in their front garden, let alone covered it in the greasy guts of an abandoned motor. Terry's parents owned the house they lived in, not the council. And Terry's father, for all his hard-man exterior, spent the weekends cultivating his roses, not stripping Ford Escorts. These people, Misty's family, were from the other side of the working class. Cash in hand, one step ahead of the rent man, ducking and diving, too many bodies in too little space. And Terry was an only child.

Misty's three brothers looked like the kind of mean, pogoing peasant who was suddenly turning up in all the places he loved, and ruining it for everyone. They still had long hair! The tail end of the summer of 1977 and they still had long hair! And not because they were like Ray, believers in another way of living, but because they were too slow and stupid to change. That hair - Terry recoiled from it. Hair that five years ago they would have beaten you up for having. Feathered hair, and flared baggy trousers, and stretchy, short-sleeve shirts so tight you could see their disgusting nipples. Their gaunt, gum-chewing faces disappeared behind the film of Terry's humiliating tears.

Ah!' laughed the smallest one. 'Now the cunt's going to start crying!'

'None of that,' Misty's father barked, and while it didn't appear to have any effect on Misty's kid brother, it certainly made Terry jump. 'He's family now - or he will be soon - and I want him treated proper. Now, the lot of you - come on. Shake the cunt's hand.' Nobody moved.

The old man's face was suddenly red with rage. 'Shake the cunt's hand!' he commanded, his rheumy eyes popping. The brothers lined up to shake Terry's hand.

'God bless,' muttered the biggest brother, almost wrenching Terry's arm out of its socket with his meaty paw. Terry shook his hand in a daze, too far gone to feel the pain. 'God bless,' repeated the middle brother, squeezing Terry's hand as hard as he could, making his fingers sound like cracking walnuts at Christmas.

'God bless,' said the smallest brother, briefly touching Terry's palm and quickly pulling his hand away, muttering under his breath, 'and if you ever look sideways at my sister Mary, I'll fucking kill you.'

Terry could see that for the rest of his time on earth he would be known as the Cunt. What are we getting the Cunt for his birthday? Would the Gunt like a drink? Is the Cunt coming round for Christmas? Finally he understood why girls - women - found the term offensive. No wonder Misty had been driven, into the arms of Germaine Greer, after growing up among all these cunts.

Misty and her mother came into the room bearing tea and ginger nuts. Her mother was a willowy heartbreaking blonde with a soft Irish accent. Terry helped her with the tea and biscuits, half in love with her already. He wanted to rescue her from this place. He wanted to be rescued.

'Well,' reflected Misty's father, his mouth full of soggy ginger nut. 'They've had their fun, Mother.'

And although Terry smiled politely, sipping his hot sweet tea, blinking back the tears, inside he thought - oh no, no, no. I haven't had my fun yet. The new hair had yet to reach Greenford. Everyone still wanted to look like someone they had seen on television or at the pictures.

Leon peered through the steamed-up window of Hair Today at a world of Farrah Fawcett flicks, Purdey pudding bowls, Annie Hall centre partings, Jane Fonda Klute feather cuts and Kevin Keegan perms.

With instruments as complicated as any brain surgeon's tool box - styling wands that hissed steam, white-hot four-pronged forks, and all those egg-shaped spacemen's helmets hovering over Nescafe-sipping heads - hair was teased, twisted and above all burned.

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You could smell it from the street - burning hair, singed into place and then held fast with clouds of sticky perfumed spray.

Leon reached inside the pocket of his Lewis Leather and felt the St Christopher's medal. After saying goodbye to Terry and Ray, he had walked to the West End and found himself staring in the window of the big Ratner's at the end of Shaftesbury Avenue, looking at the patron saint of travellers on a silver-plate chain and thinking to himself - oh, she would like that. At that moment he would have been happy to spend the rest of his life that way -finding the things that would please her. He saw Ruby immediately.

She was standing behind a chair containing a girl with hair like Susan Partridge from The Partridge Family - very long with a centre parting, and curled gently at nipple height. Radio One was playing - Tony Blackburn talking, Carly Simon singing.

There were a few men in there too - working, or getting their elaborate locks trimmed and tickled for the weekend - hearty lads with their David Essex curls, Rod Stewart peacock cuts and white-boy Afros. Leon watched one of them, the good-looking one who made all the housewives laugh, the one with the Clint Eastwood quiff, cross the floor with a can of Wella spray held in his hand like a big purple phallus.

Ruby and the Susan Partridge fan were talking to each other in the mirror, so that when the man kissed Ruby lightly on her glossy lips, Leon saw it twice - once in the mirror, and once for real - as if he really needed to have it rubbed in, as if he might somehow fail to get the message.

'Steve?' someone shouted as Leon turned away, the St Christopher tight in his fist. 'Do you want normal-hold or extra-hold on this one?' 'Wait a rninute,' Ray's bug-eyed little brother said. 'You're giving them to me? You're giving me your record collection?' Ray stuffed his spare denim jacket into his rucksack. He looked at Robbie and smiled. He wanted to give his brother his records because he was leaving, and because they were all he had to give. But he couldn't say that to his kid brother.

'I can get all the records I want now,' Ray said. 'Just don't leave them out of their sleeves, okay? I know you always do that.'

'I never do that,' Robbie insisted, hopping from foot to foot with excitement. 'I've never done that in my life, actually'

White socks, Y-fronts, Terry's tape recorder. The few shirts that hadn't been bought by his mum. As he was leaving the records behind, there wasn't much to pack.

'You've got two records and you leave them out of their sleeves all the time,' Ray said, but gentle now. 'Oh, forget it - they belong to you now. You can do what you like with them.'

'I'll take care of them,' Robbie said, reverently holding a worn copy of Let It Bleed. 'I'll take good care.'

Ray pulled the rucksack string tight and hefted the bag on his shoulder. 'Just don't destroy them the minute I'm out the door.' 'Can I even have your bed?' Robbie said.

Ray nodded. 'Sleep where you like, Rob,' he said, and it felt like there was suddenly something in his throat. He wanted to go now. But he stood there, watching his brother with the records.

Twelve inches by twelve inches, you had to hold them in both hands, and they were all you could see in front of you. Holding a record was like holding a baby, or a lover, or a work of art. Robbie waded through the collection with a kind of stunned wonder, like an archaeologist fingering impossible riches in a pharaoh's tomb. Sticky Fingers by the Rolling Stones, with the Warhol cover, the picture of the jeans with a real zip. Led Zeppelin III, with no words on the cover, no words needed, just the picture of the old farmer with a bale of twigs on his back, and then when you opened up the gatefold sleeve, you saw the picture was on the wall of a demolished house, and in the background were tower blocks going up and the old world being torn down. Revolver and Rubber Soul and Imagine - John's head, lost in

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the clouds - and records that Ray had almost forgotten about -First Steps by the Faces, back when Rod was still being played by John Peel, and Highway 61 Revisited by Dylan and Blue by Joni Mitchell - Ray had laid in bed with that record on his pillow, and dreamed of kissing those cheekbones - and Harvest by Neil Young. And greatest hits by Hendrix and the Kinks and the Lovin' Spoonful - when he was trying to catch up, cramming in everything he had missed the first time around, when his head was still spinning with how much great music there was in the world. Ray envied his little brother, with that feeling still ahead of him.

And then Robbie was pulling out the records that embarrassed Ray now - Band on the Run by Wings, Days of Future Passed by the Moody Blues and Chicago Transit Authority by Chicago. But nobody's record collection could be cool all the time. And you never knew what you were going to grow out of, you never guessed that The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter by the Incredible String Band would one day wear right off while Tupelo Honey by Van Morrison would sound great for ever.

He crouched by Robbie's side, picked up a copy of the Easy Rider soundtrack, remembering when his mum had bought it for him. Then he looked at Robbie, kneeling by his side with a copy of Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band in his hands, and he realised that his brother was crying. 'Don't go,' Robbie said.

'Ah,' Ray said, a consoling hand on the boy's shoulder. 'I have to go, Rob.' 'But I'll be all alone if you go.'

Ray hugged his brother tight, both of them on their knees, the records all around them. 'You'll never be alone,' he said. 'Not now' They pulled apart. Robbie wiped his nose on the sleeve of his bri-nylon school shirt. 'And you'll come and join me. In London. When you're big enough. Okay?' His brother nodded, trying to be brave, and Ray left the bedroom where he had been a boy, and walked down the hall past his big brother's closed room. Already the house seemed too small to live a whole life in.

His mother was waiting dry-eyed at the foot of the stairs. She handed him a small crumpled pack of something wrapped in kitchen foil. 'Fish paste,' she said, by way of explanation. 'Thanks, Mum.'

He could sense his father's presence in the living room, shuffling about, that hard man always out of place surrounded by the knick-knacks his mother stuffed into every nook and cranny, the white Spanish bull and the Greetings from Frinton ashtray and a green-and-white model of Hong Kong's Star Ferry. Ray thought about leaving without saying goodbye, but something made him push open the door, and there was the old man in the curiously stiff uniform of the Metropolitan Police.

His father stuck out an enormous hand and Ray took it in the only way he knew how, like he might take a girl's hand in the back row of the Odeon, and he saw his father flinch with a quiet contempt before he pulled his hand away. Ray realised that their attempts at civilised formality would somehow always be worse than their arguments.

Then there came the noise from upstairs. This dirty, chugging riff on slide guitar, and then a singer who sounded as if he had been gargling with gravel. The old man's face clouded with fury and disgust. 'What the bloody hell is that racket?'

'That's the Faces, Dad,' Ray laughed. He stared thoughtfully at the ceiling for a second. 'Sounds like "That's All You Need". I'll see you around.'

The car was waiting for him on the street, and some children from the neighbourhood were gathered around it, boys and girls alike in flared denims, the hems of their jeans uniformly frayed by the adventure playground and filthy with muck from their

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bikes, all of them keeping a respectful distance from the yellow Lotus Elan, as if it had come down from some other planet.

'Turn it down!' Ray heard his father shout as she opened the passenger door for him, but Ronnie and Rod and the lads just seemed to get even louder. These were the last days of hitching.

Lorry drivers and sales reps who had never heard of Jack Kerouac or On the Road would offer a lift to a young man with no money and his thumb in the air just for the company, or just to perform a good deed in a wicked world.

So it was that Leon was picked up on the North Circular by an oil tanker heading all the way to Aberdeen, and the driver told him that the English were stealing Scottish oil, just as the thieving English bastards always stole what they wanted, they would nick the coins off a dead man's eyes if you let them, and after driving all the way across the great sprawling expanse of north London, he dropped Leon off halfway up the Finchley Road, telling him to mind out for the traffic, and the thieving English bastards.

Leon walked up the hill to Hampstead, through the leafy streets with their huge houses where he had grown up, through the Village and across the Heath, the grass burned yellow by two burning summers in a row, and all of London spread out below him.

The squat would be gone by now. When the bailiffs had cleared the building, they would do what they always did. Rip out the plumbing and smash the toilets. There were other squats, thousands of them, but summer was almost gone and Leon knew that soon the squatters would be freezing their non-conforming arses off, wearing their greatcoats and Afghans inside their sleeping bags, too cold to think. Leon no longer had the heart for it.

So he went to the place where a young man goes when there is nowhere left to go. Across the Heath, over the fence that surrounded the grounds of Kenwood, past the great white house, and then the Suburb, and the clean, quiet streets of home. • He had thrown away his front-door key so he had to knock. His mother answered the door still in her dressing gown. His father was sitting at the big wooden breakfast table, surrounded by broadsheet newspapers, orange juice, coffee, bagels. Cream cheese and smoked salmon. Bach on the hi-fi - 'Sheep May Safely Graze'. Leon could smell real coffee and toasted bread, and it almost made him swoon.

'What happened to you?' his mother said, taking it all in - the fading bruise from last weekend, the cut on his forehead from Junior, the black eye from the porter with HP sauce on his head. 'He was at Lewisham,' his father said proudly. 'Bloody thugs!' 'Let me put something on it,' said his mother.

Over Leon's protests, his mother brought a pack of frozen Birds Eye peas and made him hold it against his wounds. His parents watched with a kind of affectionate amusement as Leon shovelled down bagels and lox with his spare hand. They didn't remember him having such an appetite.

'I haven't been reading your column,' Leon said, wiping crumbs from his mouth with the back of his hand. He gulped down some black coffee. He couldn't remember the last time he had drunk coffee that hadn't been the kind where you just add boiling water. 'What's your take on this Thatcher woman?'

'Never happen,' his father said emphatically. 'In this country? With Benny Hill and Page 3 lovelies and mother-in-law jokes? The British will never vote for a woman.'

'Oh, I don't know,' said his mother. T think it would be rather nice to have a woman Prime Minister.' 'She'll be burning her bra next,' his father laughed.

Leon's parents were still laughing when he undressed and crawled into bed in his old room, out of his mind with exhaustion, the room dancing around him.

It felt both cosy and ridiculous to be between these boyhood walls again, the embarrassing pictures of outgrown passions on the wall - Jaws and Jimmy Page and Jimmy Greaves - and a mad

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library where copies of Jonathan Livingstone Seagull and DasKapital shared space with Anthony Buckeridge's tales of two larky lads called Jennings and Darbishire at Linbury Court Preparatory School - Jennings Goes to School, Jennings and Darbishire, Thanks to Jennings and maybe thirty more - whatever happened to Jennings? Leon had loved Jennings, he had wanted to be Jennings -'That shepherd's pie we've just had was supersonic muck so it's wizard, but this school jam's ghastly so it's ozard… being a new chap's pretty ozard for a bit, but you'll get used to it when you've been here as long as I have.' Silly really, but it didn't matter right at this moment, because - oh, Ruby- the sheets were soft and clean and his parents had taken him back without making him feel bad, without asking any questions, as if he had never been away, as if he had never thrown away his front-door key, and Leon knew it would be like that for as long as they lived, they would never turn him away, and also he could not feel too bad about sleeping under a Jaws duvet because he was so very tired, swamped - swamped… swamped… swamped by tiredness, his eyes closing now - and he knew that sleep would come the moment he laid his head on the pillow. And it did.

So Leon drifted away, a man in a boy's bedroom, the St Christopher around his neck feeling cool against his skin, and many miles to go when he awoke.

286

CODA:

1977 - ANOTHER GIRL. ANOTHER PLANET

SIXTEEN

Terry liked belonging. He saw that now.

Belonging to his paper, belonging to her. It was good. He was glad that he hadn't been sacked. He was happy that they hadn't broken up. Knowing he was getting married next month, knowing he was going to be a father next year - these things did not frighten him. They made him feel as though he belonged to this woman, and to this unborn child, and to this world.

But sometimes The Paper felt like just another job, where someone older than you was always telling you what to do, not so very different from the gin factory, except there was less freedom to run wild. And sometimes Misty really got on his nerves.

The two of them sat facing each other on the Inter-City 125 train, waiting for it to leave, and Misty was reading aloud from a paperback called The Flames of Love that she had just bought at W. H. Smiths. And Terry understood that the opposite of love is not hate. The opposite of love is irritation.

'Listen to this bit,' she said. 'She came through the French windows and suddenly felt his strong, manly, dirty fingers in her taffeta. Miles the gardener was on his knees before her, imploring with his heavy-lidded eyes.' Misty guffawed. 'She gasped as he kissed the hem of her gown. "Valerie," he said, "do you understand how big this thing is?"'

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A gaggle of businessmen staggered down the carriage, smelling of smoky bacon crisps and shorts bolted down at the railway bar. They eyed Misty hungrily. Terry glared at them. She didn't notice. She was enjoying her Doris Hardman too much.

'"No one - least of all that cad Sir Timothy - is man enough to do more than kiss your gilded slippers'" She was laughing so hard now that she struggled to get the words out. Misty shook her head, wide-eyed with disbelief. 'Isn't this just fabulous? Don't you love it? I'm going to read everything by her, she's so mad.'

Terry smiled politely. It was funny - he could see that - but was it quite as funny as Misty was making out? Was she planning to read the whole book out loud? Was it going to be like this all the way to Sheffield? Was it going to be like this for the next fifty years?

He could hardly stand to admit it, but it was suddenly all a little bit different. With Misty, and with The Paper too. He began leafing through the latest issue. It was a good issue. The kind of issue that would have had his heart beating faster when he was out there in reader-land, travelling up to the city to buy The Paper a day early with all the other true believers.

Young Elvis on the cover in all his greasy pomp. Pages of tributes and memories and reflections from some of the older guys. Ray's interview with Lennon. And the new guy tearing Dag Wood to bits for spending most of his gig at the Rainbow squatting behind the amps, his leather trousers down by his ankles, clutching his stomach and groaning.

And - who would have thought it? - the diary mention of a band called Electric Baguette who wore Italian suits and played synthetic dance music and said they were bored with politics, they just wanted to make pop music and money. Brainiac had finally formed his band, and everybody seemed to think they were going to be the next hot thing. Funny how time slipped away - it was no longer the Sex Pistols that filled the sky for the new groups, but Chic. How quickly the new music - the new anything - became old hat. There was a rumour that Brainiac had even had his teeth fixed. But Terry closed The Paper, feeling curiously unmoved by all of it.

Partly it was the ham-fisted, infantile quality of much of the writing - one of the older guys had compared Elvis to Jay Gatsby, 'the hero of F. Scott Fitzgerald's brilliant novel, The Great Gatsby' As if everyone needed to be told who Jay Gatsby was, and as if everyone needed to be told that the book was one of the greatest novels ever written. As if, Terry thought, we're all just a bunch of dumb kids, waiting to be educated by our betters. There was nothing by Skip Jones in The Paper. For Terry, there was always something missing when Skip's by-line wasn't in there. He was happy that Skip was on the mend. But The Paper seemed almost ordinary without him.

'His large hands were too powerful to resist,' Misty giggled. 'His mouth fastened on her rosebud lips like a vice.' She looked up at Terry. 'Now how can lips possibly be like a vice, you silly cow?' She shrugged. 'Oh well… She felt his desire rise up inside her -that's a bit of a Freudian slip, his desire rising up inside her - then suddenly he swept her up in his rope-like muscles and carried her to the waiting four-poster. "Damn you, Valerie!" he cried hoarsely. "Why should we wait another year?" And she knew in her beating heart that her reticence was only inflaming him still further.'

The real reason Terry felt a little blue today was because for the first time he could see an end to the whole music thing. He thought it was changing. But it was more than that. It was dying.

One of his best friends had been kicked out, and the other one seemed suddenly to have a proper job, his future set in stone, the career of an adult. They had sent Ray off to New York to talk to Springsteen. His comeback was complete.

But for Terry this life was coming to its natural end - as if it was really just his version of going to university, or doing national service. A few years and you were out. You went in a boy and you came out a man. All grown up. Or at least on your way to being grown up.

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You turned around and the bands were new, and a bit younger than you, and you didn't like them quite as much as the bands you kicked around with at the start, the bands who were now struggling to record their second albums, or trying to crack America, or arguing among themselves, or overdoing the drugs. Suddenly, just to seem interested, you had to fake it a bit.

And the faces in the clubs and at the gigs were changing too. Now every night he went out he was aware that he no longer knew everyone in the house. The familiar faces were thinning out.

The day after the Western World disaster, Billy Blitzen had gone back to New York, deported by the Home Office for not having the correct work permit. Legend had it that Billy went home to Brooklyn with his guitar full of Iranian heroin, which he sold at a rock-bottom price to his kid brother, who had never even smoked a spliff before. Terry had no way of knowing it as he sat on that train with Misty, but Billy was just a few years away from a date with a disease that none of them had heard of yet.

And whatever happened to all the other boys and girls that Terry had known back in the summer of 1976? Where had they all gone? To drugs and nervous breakdowns? To marriage and babies? To real jobs and early nights? He would never know.

He knew he would miss the good stuff. He would miss coming down the stairs of some club into a world of noise, his spirits lifting with the music and the speed, the feeling of sweat inside his Oxfam jacket, and the overwhelming sensation of being a part of it all. But he couldn't kid himself. The life he had known was drawing to an end.

He tried to remember what Skip had said. He knew it was something about all art forms having their day. Like jazz had its day. Like painting had its day. Skip had said that there would probably never be another Miles Davis, and there would never be another Picasso. Skip had said that the music would never again be quite as good as the music they had loved, and so you were left with just another dying art form, and soon it would be ready for the museum.

But if their music was dying, wouldn't they die with it? It had been the heart of their world for as long as Terry could remember. Their music was more than a soundtrack - it was a life-support machine from childhood through adolescence and into what was passing for maturity. Perhaps they were all going to have to find other things to live for, and the music would be just something they came back to now and again, like the memory of someone you had lost.

As he waited for the train to leave the station, Terry felt lucky that he had a woman he loved, a baby on the way, and a little family of his own. Things would be easier after the wedding, wouldn't they?

'She felt the love she had for him burning inside her. He was all she wanted and all she would ever need. Her young body trembled with a thrill that felt one step from sin. Soon she would be his wife and be his forever.'

Terry walked down to the dining car to look for tea and bacon sandwiches. By the time he came back empty-handed, Misty had put down her book and was staring thoughtfully out of the window.

'They're on strike,' Terry said. 'This bloody country. Somebody should do something.'

But she wasn't listening. She didn't care about bacon sandwiches and strikes on British Rail.

'What do you think is better?' she said. 'To never change - to be the same person you always were as a kid - or to grow out of all that stuff and grow old gracefully?'

'We'll never be old,' Terry smiled. 'They'll have invented a cure for it by the time we get there.'

She stuffed Doris Hardman into her bag, and then paused when she caught a glimpse of something. She pulled out her pair of pink fake mink handcuffs. 'Remember these?' she said, as if they would bring the fond

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memories flooding back. But all Terry remembered were silly games where he didn't know the rules.

He watched her snap one of the pink fake mink cuffs around her wrist and admire it, as if it were the finest bracelet in the window of Ratner's. Then, with one of those aren't-I-a-naughty-thing? looks on her face, she reached across the table separating them and snapped the other cuff around Terry's wrist. T remember,' Terry said.

Misty rippled with laughter. 'I wonder if Doris Hardman would approve?' she said. 'Can you believe that millions of ordinary women fill their heads with that garbage?' Terry nodded. 'Can you take it off?'

Misty fumbled in her bag for the key. Then she began to search more desperately, and it took a long moment for him to realise that she wasn't joking. Terry stared at the pink fake mink handcuffs around his wrist and then he looked away. He loved her but sometimes she drove him crazy. Was that real love? Or was that something else? Did true love really have room in it for irritation? Or was that kind of love a lesser kind, a love that was already on the way out?

The thing was, now that he knew he was definitely going to be with this one girl - woman - for the rest of his life, he sort of missed all the others he had known. And he couldn't help wondering how it would have turned out if he had gone with one of them instead.

He missed Sally, missed her goodness and decency, and he missed the way she didn't look like everyone he had grown up with. He missed that lustrous black hair, he missed those eyes like melting chocolate, and he missed her slim, golden body inside the sleeping bag on the night shift. He missed how straightforward she was, and he missed her friendship. He missed the way she never mentioned the suffocating tyranny of men.

And he even missed Grace Fury, despite the strangeness and the horror of her visit to his flat, because everybody wanted her, and because he loved it when they had that wildness inside them.

Terry could have been happy with any of them. At least for a while. They were all great women in their way, and they all liked him. Maybe more than Misty liked him. Because he knew he irritated her too. Loving someone - it wasn't the same as liking them.

And he wondered how much choice we really have in the person we end up with, and how much of it is down to pure chance. That was the big problem with loving someone. There were lots of other people that you could love, if the timing was right, and if you got the chance, and if you were not already promised to someone else. It all just seemed so random.

But Terry had built his dreams around the one in front of him, and there was a baby growing inside her, he had to follow those dreams through now. Then she winked at him, and smiled, and he was aware of the old feelings, felt them rising up inside him, as strong as they ever were. Maybe it would be all right after all. Maybe it would. He looked up as a whistle blew, knowing that, either way, it was too late to stop now. The whistle blew again.

The train lurched forward and began to move out of the station, the jewel lights of the city soon yielding to the soft dusk of harvest fields, and they headed north into what was left of summer with the pair of them still joined at the wrist, just like Sidney Poitier and Tony Curtis as runaway prisoners in The Defiant Ones, or the bride and groom on a wedding cake.

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