The Dwarves of Death

Theme Two

While I was waiting for the kettle to boil, I looked to see if Tina had written me a note before going out to work. She worked on the night shift in the word-processing department of a big legal firm in the City; her hours were from seven in the evening until two in the morning. This meant that she was never in when I got home at night, and always asleep when I left for work in the mornings. In other words, we never saw each other. I doubt if I had seen Tina for more than two or three hours in total since moving into her flat. Even at weekends she would sleep during the day and stay up all night, and besides, I made a point of trying not to be in the flat at weekends, because I found it too depressing. Just about everything I knew about her, then, I had learnt either from Tony and Judith, or from the notes which she used to leave me before going out to work. I knew, for instance, that she was about five years older than me and that she was dating a Spanish guy called Pedro, who lived in Hackney and worked similar hours to hers, as a mini-cab driver. She’d given him a key to the flat and he used to come in every morning at about three, just to sleep with her. Actually I don’t know why I’d got the impression that he was smarmy. I’d never met him or anything. Until that night, I’d never even heard his voice.

For the purpose of leaving notes to each other, there was a pad of lined A4 on the kitchen table. It seemed so much more satisfactory than just writing on little scraps of paper. This way we could get a proper dialogue going. I picked up the most recent sheet and read over the whole of the last week’s exchanges. They started fairly modestly, with a message from Tina:

Dear W, I see you have still not done the washing up. Nearly all the dirty crocks are yours and I’m blowed if I’m going to do it all for you. How do you expect me to cook a nice breakfast for P in the afternoons when I can’t even get at the sink? A man phoned for you this afternoon. Love T.

T — The simple reason I have not done the washing up is that there is NO LIQUID, and I know for a fact it is your turn to buy it. Have you noticed those damp patches on the bathroom walls and what do you think we should do about it? Telling me ‘a man phoned’ is no use at all if you’re not going to tell me what it was about. Did he have a Welsh accent? W.

Dear W, Are you blind or something, I put the washing-up liquid in the cupboard, right next to the chocohte biscuits. I’m sorry about the patches on the bathroom walls, it’s nothing serious. P and I had a bath together yesterday afternoon and he got a bit excited, that’s all. He’s such a sweetheart. I’m not very good at accents — it sounded more West Country to me. Somebody else rang today only I’m not sure if it was the same person, they got me out of bed and I wasn’t really with it. Are you going to eat up that cheese or just let it go mouldy? Love, T.

T — I’ve done most of the washing up, you’ll notice, but didn’t have time to finish it because I overslept. Why did I oversleep? Because the bloody phone woke me at four in the morning, that’s why! I suppose it was good old Tommy the Toreador again. You didn’t exactly keep your voice down while you were talking to him, either. You must have been nattering away for nearly half an hour. Incidentally could you take proper messages in future because these people ringing up for me might be offering WORK. Yes, I am going to eat the cheese. It looks in perfectly good condition to me. W.

Dear W, How do you think I felt, having to ANSWER the phone at four in the morning? I was devastated when P rang at that hour. He’s never done anything like this to me before. He didn’t give any proper reason for not coming over but I could hear music playing in the background so he must have been at some club or party or something. We weren’t talking for NEARLY half an hour. In fact he was very short with me. And I had to raise my voice because he could hardly hear me. Anyway, I was damn well going to have my say, if he was going to treat me like that. I’m sorry if I disturbed your sleep but what about MY FEELINGS? I didn’t sleep a WINK that night, as you can imagine.

I’ve thrown away your cheese. It was starting to pong the place out. Love, T.

P.S. What with your messages and P phoning up at all hours, what would you say to sharing the cost of an answering machine?

T — I’m sorry if Pedro upset you and you had a rough night, but I think it’s a bit small-minded to take it out on an inoffensive bit of cheese. The kitchen still smells and if you look in the fridge I think you’ll find that the culprit is your jar of taramasalata which is well past its ‘best before’ date. Yes, getting an answering machine would be an excellent idea and I’d be very happy to pay half. W.

Dear W, I had another bad night last night and I must say it didn’t help hearing you clattering about this morning like a herd of merording buffaloes. Could you not be a bit quieter when you get your breakfast in the mornings? There have been no more calls for you but I wonder if our phone is out of order or something because I’m sure P would have rung up to apologize for not coming round again. Have you got any intention of giving me any money for the rent? It’s been more than four weeks now and I’m not made of money you know. By the way I saw you out of the window today going off to work and you do look thin. Are you eating enough? There is some cold casserole in the fridge and you are welcome to it. I made enough for two this afternoon but guess who never turned up to have his share.

I popped into Town this afternoon and bought the machine. Exciting, isn’t it? I hope I’ve set it up right. You can check and also see if anybody has left a message yet. Love, T.

I opened the fridge and found the cold casserole dish. It looked pretty grim by now but tasted all right. I suppose I should have heated it up and put it on a plate and everything but that’s not the kind of thing you feel like doing at that time in the morning. I just got a spoon and took the whole thing through into the sitting-room.

The answering machine was all fixed up and there was a little green light flashing. I gathered from the instruction book (which Tina had left by the side of the telephone) that this meant there was a message waiting. I wondered if it would be my mysterious caller with the West Country accent, or maybe someone from Midi Mania magazine, calling to say that they’d read my reviews and wanted me to write for them. But as it turned out there was only one message, delivered by a voice which was unmistakably Spanish:

‘Hello, Tina, my sweetest darling. Yes, it is Pedro, Big Boy, your little prickly cactus, and I was hoping to catch you before you went to work. Never mind. I was going to send you a million flowers to apologize for not seeing you again last night, but why don’t I just come round tonight instead for a bit of a bath, and maybe something else, if you get what I’m drifting at. I know I can rely on you baby, to keep a light burning in your window. See you later, honeychops.’

The machine clicked off.

I scraped the rest of the casserole into the pedal bin. It was time for bed.

*

The estate I lived on was called the Herbert Estate. It was built in the 1930s, and I’m told there were even some of the original tenants there — people who’d been living on the estate for more than fifty years. Me, I’d been there about fifteen months and I couldn’t wait to get shot of the place. It wasn’t that I disliked my neighbours, it was just that I didn’t feel I had much in common with them. The standard uniform for men involved tattoos on the chest and forearms, and preferably a couple of Alsatians or Rottweilers on the end of a leash. The women just carried babies around with them all day — pushing them along in prams, or pulling them along in harnesses, or just walking to the shops with a whole crowd of little kids running around at their heels, shouting and screaming and making trouble. To keep these kids quiet their mothers would buy them sweets and crisps and chocolate and cans of sweet Coke and lemonade, which was why their complexions were so pale and their lips so red and their teeth already blackening. The women on the estate always seemed to be pregnant. There were six kids at least in the flat underneath ours and another one was on its way (by accident, as I was able to gather one night from a particularly loud argument which went on in the room beneath my bedroom). A lot of the men were out of work, and couldn’t find much to do all day besides wandering around and visiting the pubs and the betting shop, so it’s hard to see how these families made ends meet.

It wasn’t an especially violent estate, it was even held together by a downbeat sort of community spirit, a shared sense that life was an uphill struggle and that as long as we were all living there, there was nothing to get too cheerful about. Every so often at night police cars would come tearing up with their lights flashing and their sirens wailing and there would be some kind of disturbance, but we would never find out what it was about. We had three locks on our door and bars on our windows so we never got broken into. Just up the road there was the Salvation Army hostel, and we used to get the drop-outs and winos walking up and down all day, going up to the park if the weather was good, or otherwise just dropping into the off-licence for their cider or their Special Brew, and then sitting down and drinking it out on the street.

It was a far cry from what I expected when I moved down to London. Then again, I don’t know what I did expect. I’d had a nicely cosseted middle-class upbringing on the outskirts of Sheffield, and I spent the first twenty years of my life there without knowing enough about the world to realize how lucky I was. We were a close-knit family, the three of us, and I didn’t make many friends: there was really only Derek, who lived next door, and Stacey, who I nearly married.

Derek was a couple of years older than me, but this had never seemed to make much difference, even during that teenage period when two years can seem like the most uncrossable of generation gaps. I suppose what kept us together was that we were both obsessed with music (although in different ways). My obsession tended to be practical: I was interested in listening to records purely for what I could learn from them and then apply to my own playing. (I was playing guitar at the time; I didn’t move on to piano until I was nearly seventeen.) But Derek aspired to nothing more than consumption. He was avaricious about new trends in music, and would devour and digest them before the rest of us knew what was happening. It began with punk, which excited something in him even at the age of fourteen. At the time I was still listening to stupid bands who specialized in classical rip-offs and concept albums with great big gatefold sleeves covered with pictures straight out of Tolkien; but he soon talked me out of that. I used to go up to his bedroom and he’d play me the latest singles (I never used to buy singles) on his ancient Dansette record-player. He’d be buying five or six a week, maybe more. This was in the days when twelve-inch singles and picture discs were big news. Then there was New Romanticism (so-called), then there was a wilderness period when he went around looking gloomy and saying that there was nothing interesting happening, and then there was Hip-Hop and House to keep him happy. Meanwhile I had started playing in a local band and he would come dutifully along to our gigs, never saying much about the music, from which I guessed that he didn’t like it particularly. Sometimes he would say things like we didn’t have enough presence, and he’d criticize our haircuts. I suppose by then our friendship had developed in different ways and we didn’t talk about music so often. I’ve always thought that the committed listener and the committed performer don’t, in the long run, have all that much in common.

It was good that Derek used to come to our gigs, though, because he was company for Stacey. The two of them would turn up wherever we were playing — usually it was nothing more glamorous than a Saturday-evening support slot at the Leadmill — and stand in the front row where I could see them, and then the three of us would go along for a drink somewhere afterwards. Stacey was terrific. I still think this, even now.

At first when I left school I didn’t want to go to college, I wanted to go straight into music, and the only job I could find which made use of my chemistry ‘A’ level was making up prescriptions behind the counter at Boots. That was where I met Stacey. She worked on cosmetics.

Why am I telling you all this anyway? I don’t know how I got started on this subject. Everything has its place, and I’m supposed to be describing the Herbert Estate. And the reason I was doing that is because the next morning, at eight o’clock, I came out of the flat and started to walk through it on my way to work.

Progress was slow, to say the least, because I had my synth with me, and the combined weight of this keyboard and its carrying case was just about as much as my arms could bear. We would be rehearsing straight after work that night and I wouldn’t have time to come back to the flat, so I had no option but to carry this monstrous thing with me all the way to the shop.

Out on the estate the first thing I saw was a bunch of kids, who should all have been on their way to school, throwing bricks at a bicycle. They all had skinhead haircuts and stonewashed jeans, and they jeered and shouted obscenities at me as I struggled past with my keyboard.

‘What a wimp!’ they were chanting.

I couldn’t really disagree with them: they all looked about ten times stronger than me. On this estate I had once seen two eight-year-old children lift up a concrete bollard and hurl it through the window of a Ford Fiesta.

As I staggered past the grocer’s and the chip shop I realized that there was no way I could carry the keyboard for more than another ten yards. I had been walking for five minutes and I had another mile and a quarter to go to the tube station. My face was purple, I was sweating profusely and I was gasping for breath. I dropped the keyboard on the ground, sat down on it and buried my head in my hands. After a while I tried to pick it up again. I couldn’t. It was as if it was glued to the pavement. I sat down again and rested. One of my neighbours, several months pregnant, pushing a pram and with a small child in a harness on her back, came past and offered to carry it for me for a while. I politely refused. There was a call-box nearby: I knew I was going to have to phone for a mini-cab.

It was a dismal morning, misty and wet, and I sat on the pavement shivering and rubbing my hands as I waited for the cab to arrive. Ten minutes later an old beige Rover 2000 pulled up beside me.

‘Cheapside, wasn’t it?’ said the driver, a tough-looking customer wearing an off-white vest that revealed an indecent pelt of hair adorning his back and shoulders.

‘That’s right,’ I said, getting up.

He looked at my keyboard.

‘Is that yours?’

‘Yes.’

‘Can’t take that, mate. No way.’

‘What?’

‘You should have told them you wanted an estate or something. There’s no way I’m taking that thing. No fucking way.’

‘I’m sure it would fit on the back seat.’

‘The back seat’s for passengers, mate. This is a passenger vehicle, not a fucking removal van. Do you know what that would do to my upholstery?’

‘Maybe if we tried the boot — ’

‘Have a look at that upholstery. Go on, have a look.’

I opened the back door and looked inside.

‘Very nice.’

‘Do you know how much that cost me? Sixty quid. Sixty quid, that cost me. If you think I’m going to fuck that up with heavy objects, you’ve got another think coming, mate.’

‘Well, I see your point — ’

‘Should have cost twice that, of course, but this mate of mine, see, he did it cheap. Anyway, I could be sacked if I start doing removals. More than my job’s worth, that is.’

‘OK, look, forget it.’

‘Six quid minimum, it’ll cost you, if I’m going to take that big fucker in the back of my car. Where was it you wanted to go, Cheapside? Well, that’s the other side of the river, isn’t it, that’s another fiver just to start with.’

‘Don’t worry, I’ll get there some other way.’

‘I’m not worried mate. I’m not worried. You’re the one that should be worried. ’Course, I shall have to charge you three fifty just for calling me out. If you’d told the bloke on the phone you wanted the contents of your house removing you could have saved us all a lot of trouble. What are you going to do now, then, catch a bus?’

‘Yes, I suppose so.’

‘Nearest bus-stop’s half a mile away, isn’t it? Anyway, no driver’s going to let you on with that thing, are they? You know what I think, mate? I think you’re well and truly fucked. Have you got one of our cards?’

He gave me a card with the name of the firm and a telephone number on it, and then drove off.

I don’t know how I did it, but I staggered into work and arrived three-quarters of an hour late. Nobody said anything.

It was a tedious job, working in a record shop right in the heart of the City. The guys who came in to buy their Michael Jackson and Whitney Houston albums all looked like overpaid schoolboys. Not one of them seemed to have a spark of individuality. They all bought the same records and all wore the same clothes — striped shirts and fancy ties and smooth dark suits. I won’t say anything more about this job except that I did it for about nine months and was always on the look-out for something better. For several months now I had been trying to get work with various music magazines: Focus On Feedback, Midi Mania, that sort of thing. Just doing reviews and so on. But it was impossible ever to get a straight answer from those people. God knows how many hours I spent on the telephone, being bounced from extension to extension: ‘Could you hold the line, please?’ ‘Hang on, I’ll just transfer you.’ ‘Line’s engaged, can you hold?’ And then nothing but equivocation: Yes, we’ve read your material. We’ll get back to you in a few more weeks. We’re keeping you on file. I’ve passed you on to Features. We’ll let you know as soon as the right subject comes up. We’re always interested in new writers. We’re just waiting for Vivien to come back from holiday.

Some people don’t realize that a straight ‘No’ can be the kindest answer in the world.

*

The band I was in at this time, which was called The Alaska Factory, used to rehearse at Thorn Bird Studios near London Bridge.

It was a big complex, occupying most of a converted warehouse which backed on to the river. There were six rehearsal rooms, Studios A — F, and two recording studios, Rooms I and 2, which were 16-track and 8-track respectively. There was also a refreshment area, where you could buy drinks and sandwiches, and a TV and a couple of games machines. The rehearsal rooms were damp and dark and used to smell something awful after you’d been in them for a while. Most of the equipment was clapped out and knackered. The only reason we went there, I suppose, was habit, and the fact that it was quite cheap. Chester had worked out some deal with the guy who ran it, although how he’d managed to do that I don’t know: I’d seen them talking together sometimes — often in a rather secretive way — and I gathered that they had some kind of understanding, based on God knows what shady arrangement. I didn’t like to ask too much where those two were concerned. Anyway, we were just thankful not to have to negotiate a rate ourselves, because this guy was not, in our experience, the easiest person to get on with. I’ll qualify that. He was a total slimeball.

I don’t know if you’ve ever met anyone like this, but there are some people who are just so compulsively unpleasant that even when they desperately need your goodwill and your money, even when their very livelihood depends upon them being nice to you, they can’t bring themselves to do it. Personally I think this is the mark of the true psychopath. I’ve never known anyone be so rude to his customers as this guy was. It wasn’t just us, either. He did it to everybody.

He was a stringy sort of guy, probably in his late thirties but prematurely balding. All day long he would sit behind his desk, buttonholing any luckless musician who happened to pass by on his way from a rehearsal room to the lavatory and boring him to death with endless stories about his days on the road with any number of famous bands that he’d probably never had anything to do with. If he was to be believed, he’d been a drummer, guitarist, record producer and tour manager in his time, and fantastically successful at all of them. His name was Vincent, and just about the only work he ever seemed to do was to operate the till and unlock the doors to the studios and storage rooms. Sometimes, with a stream of sarcastic and patronizing remarks, he would guide people back to their rehearsal rooms, because it was incredibly easy to get lost in that building. It was an almighty labyrinth, taking up at least three or four floors (including the basement) of the old warehouse. I used to get lost there myself, looking for the lavatory or something, and I’d been going there for months. And it was amazing how, when you were wandering around in some unlit corridor — not even knowing whether to go up or down, there were so many little staircases — he would loom up out of the darkness with some stupid phrase like, ‘Having trouble, are we?’ and make a big deal out of taking you back to your studio. It was almost as if he kept tabs on where everyone was and what they were doing.

Initially, that evening, I thought I’d caught him in a good mood. This was a relief, because I was the first person to arrive, so I had to sit chatting with him for a while, while I waited for the others to show up. I began by asking what room Chester had booked for us that evening.

‘Studio D,’ he said. ‘Three mikes and a Gretsch kit. That’s right, isn’t it?’

‘Yes. I don’t think we’ve been in there before, have we? It’ll be interesting to see how it sounds; we weren’t too happy with the sound we were getting in Studio E.’

I immediately realized that I’d said the wrong thing.

‘What do you mean?’ he said.

‘It was… distorting a bit.’

‘Distorting? Studio E? You’ve got to be joking, mate.’

‘The sound was a bit… muddy.’

‘Muddy? I can’t believe I’m hearing this. That’s the best fucking PA we’ve got, mate, it’s brand new, that is, if you can’t get a good sound out of that you must be fucking useless.’

‘Well, it just sounded…’

‘What was distorting, then? Vocals, was it?’

‘Well, it was mainly the bass sound — ’

‘The bass? What’s that got to do with the PA? What kind of amp was he using?’

‘He doesn’t use an amp, he goes straight into the desk.’

‘Straight into the desk? Are you out of your fucking mind? That’s a vocal PA, that is, mate, you can’t put a bass through there. Was he using a D. I. box?’

‘What?’

‘Was he using a D. I. box?’

‘Well, I’m not sure. I’m only the keyboard player, you see.’

He sighed contemptuously. ‘You know what a D. I. box is, don’t you?’

‘Of course I do,’ I said, with a nervous laugh. He started laughing, too, and we chuckled mirthlessly over the naivety of the question.

‘Well he wouldn’t try to put a bass through a vocal PA without a D. I. box, would he?’ he said, and before I had time to answer, went on, ‘In which case I can only assume that when you tell me that the sound you were getting was “muddy", you must be taking the old wee-wee. It’s fucking immaculate, that PA. You’ve got a Yamaha REV-7 in the outboard rack for your vocal reverb, and a Roland SDE-3000 to give you short delay. You’ve got four dbx 160X compressors and two 27-band Klark Tekniks. You know what those are, don’t you?’

‘Sure. They’re the…’

‘…the graphic equalizers, right.’

‘27-band, eh? Wow.’

‘The whole rig’s powered by C Audio amps, right? It’s a four-way system with Brook Siren crossovers. They’ve all got compression drivers and there’s even an extra cab with a 24-inch sub-woofer. So how the fuck can you be getting a muddy sound out of that lot?’

‘Beats me,’ I said, smiling desperately. ‘Perhaps we forgot to switch it on.’

He ignored this remark.

‘Anyway, you guys must have tried just about every bloody room we’ve got.’

‘Not quite,’ I said. ‘We’ve never used Studio B.’ I got up and walked over to his desk, so that I could see the diary in which he recorded all his bookings. ‘Maybe we should try Studio B. Is anyone using it tonight?’

‘Probably’ he said. ‘It’s very popular, Studio B.’

I tried to look at the diary but he suddenly leant over it, hiding it from view.

‘Why does Chester never book us into Studio B?’ I asked. ‘What’s so special about it?’

‘We’ve been kitting it out,’ he said. ‘Putting a new PA in. It’s not quite ready yet.’

I can’t deny that I had been intrigued by this question for some time. Somewhere in the building — I’m not sure where — was a heavy black door with a big capital B on it. So far as I knew, no band had ever been allowed to use this room, and Vincent was always coming up with contradictory stories about why it wasn’t available. Sometimes it was booked up for the next three weeks, sometimes it was being re-fitted, sometimes it was being used for storage. Sometimes he would give elaborate accounts of the new equipment he was installing there; other times, he would go tight-lipped at the very mention of it.

‘We’re not taking any more bookings for Studio B at the moment,’ he said, snapping the diary shut. ‘You’ll be the first to know when we are.’

I was about to question him further, when we were interrupted by the arrival of Harry, our bass player and lead vocalist. The next few minutes were taken up with getting our instruments out of storage, testing the mikes and starting to set up.

We were in the smallest of the studios, and the one with the lowest roof. Harry, in fact, could barely stand up straight. I can’t think of much to tell you about Harry, except that he was about the most normal and easy-going member of the band. He was an averagely good bass player and an averagely good singer. He played because he enjoyed it, and didn’t have any great ambitions to be a pop star, or any difficult personal hang-ups. This was where he differed from the other two, who arrived together, about ten minutes later.

Martin was an insurance clerk by day and a guitar hero by night. He earned about four times as much as the rest of us (not that this is saying much), and everything he could save out of his income was spent on musical equipment. He had a hand-carved guitar and he would change the strings before every rehearsal. Sometimes he would change them between numbers. His amplifier, which was taller than he was, was worth more than the rest of our equipment put together. It had an absurd control panel which was a blaze of coloured lights and digital displays, and it was kept permanently in store because the four of us were incapable of carrying it anywhere. Lambeth Council could have re-housed half a dozen disadvantaged families in it. All of which would have been fine, if Martin had been a good guitarist; but the fact was that he only knew about five chords and had never managed to improvise a solo in his life. What he lacked in musical ability he made up in technical perfectionism. At one of our gigs, it had once taken him thirty-seven minutes to tune up. He kept us all permanently on a knife-edge because it only needed some tiny, barely detectable flaw in the sound we were getting for him to explode into one of his tantrums. Once, when we were playing in a pub in Leytonstone and had some feedback problems with the vocals, he stormed off stage and was later found to have locked himself in the boot of his car. He had crew-cut hair and an intense expression and he always wore a tie. I never saw him without one.

Then there was our drummer, Jake, a hardline existentialist with a black beret and gold-rimmed National Health glasses. Jake was still a student, doing a part-time degree in philosophy and literature at Birkbeck, I think. He practised in his room by using a copy of Being and Nothingness as a snare and all three volumes of A la Recherche du Temps Perdu as tom-toms. Like Martin, he had his limitations as a musician. He had a huge collection of records featuring some of the most technically adventurous drummers in history — Art Blakey, Elvin Jones, Tony Williams, Jack DeJohnette — but we never managed to teach him to play in any time signature other than 4/4, and he could hardly stray away from the bass drum and the snare without getting hopelessly confused. In fact this was the only drum pattern he knew:

Ask Jake to accompany you on a featherweight version of ‘The Girl From Ipanema’ and that’s the pattern he would have used, at top volume. He used to write songs for the band, too, but we never bothered to play any of them. Somehow his twin passions for metaphysics and pop music never cohered into a satisfactory whole. He would end up writing songs which combined the philosophical complexity of ‘Bat Out Of Hell’ with the raw rock’n’roll energy of Schopenhauer’s The World As Will and Representation. I liked Jake, on the whole, but found him infuriating. If he hadn’t been so intelligent I think he would have been one of the stupidest people I ever met in my life.

It was the first time we had all met up since our last, disastrous gig, so before starting to play we sat around for a while and chatted about it. Morale was low in The Alaska Factory, at this time. We’d been playing live for nearly a year now, and it was beginning to feel as though we hadn’t made an inch of progress. We still had the same hard-core following of about nine people, consisting mainly of relatives and girlfriends. (Madeline, incidentally, had never been to hear us play: in fact she had never even heard one of our tapes. She had never expressed any curiosity, and I didn’t feel strongly enough about our material — most of which was written by either Harry or Martin — to make her listen to any of it. For my part, I never talked about Madeline to the rest of the band. They knew her name and knew that she was my girlfriend, but they had never met her, and I was happy to keep it that way. It satisfied something in me to be leading two completely independent lives. I knew, too, that she wouldn’t have liked them; she wouldn’t have liked the tattiness of Thorn Bird Studios, either, or the places where we used to eat afterwards, or the venues where Chester used to arrange for us to play.) Our hold on the pathetically simple music we used to play remained as fragile as ever. It still wasn’t unknown for us to lose time completely in the middle of a twelve-bar blues. And the thing that we were all holding out for, that mirage, the holy grail which is the gleam in the eye of every aspiring band — a recording contract — seemed, as usual, to be utterly beyond our reach.

This evening, moreover, we had business to discuss, because we’d decided that we were going to record a new demo tape. We’d each arranged to take time off work and we’d booked into Room 2 for Tuesday morning, in four days’ time. Unusually, and largely because I had the support of Chester, I’d managed to persuade the others that we should record one of my pieces, an uplifting, danceable sort of number called ‘Stranger in a Foreign Land’ which was one of the latest things I’d written (Harry had helped me with the words). It called for one or two modest key changes and some shifts in dynamics that I wasn’t sure we would be able to handle, so we agreed to spend most of that night’s session practising it.

I gave Martin a chord sheet that I’d written out during my lunch break, and then turned to Jake.

‘I think — er — I think we want to give this a kind of Afro-Latin feel,’ I explained. ‘You know, lots of off-beats.’

‘Uh-huh,’ he said, nervously.

I looked to Harry for support.

‘Isn’t that right?’

He nodded. ‘Yeah, it’s…’ He begun to tap his feet and count silently to himself. ‘It wants to go, sort of… chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga, chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga. Isn’t that the sort of thing?’

I frowned. ‘Well, I was thinking more in terms of… chuggachug chuggachug chuggachug chuggachug… You know, as if we had shakers or something.’

‘Well, why doesn’t Jake try those out, and see which fits?’

Jake looked at us, from one to the other, nodded, spat on his hands, picked up his heaviest sticks and launched straight into:

After a few bars I signalled to him to stop but he was enjoying himself too much, and before I could do anything Martin had joined in, hammering out the same two chords incessandy so that the whole thing started to sound like a grotesque parody of a Status Quo number.

‘All right, all right!’ I shouted and waved my arms and managed to get them to stop. ‘That sounded… just great, boys, but do you think we could get back to my song?’

‘That was your song,’ said Martin.

‘It was?’

‘Those are the chords you’ve written here.’ He showed me the chord sheet. ‘E and F sharp, right?’

‘Well… nearly, Martin, nearly. You see, what we actually have here is an E minor nine, and an F sharp minor seven. You were playing major chords.’

‘Does it make much difference?’

‘Well, technically — yes. You see, they have different notes in them.’

‘I think we should keep things simple.’

‘Simplicity’s great, Martin, I’m all for simplicity. Don’t get me wrong. It’s just that what you were playing, from a — well, from a musical point of view, really — is completely different from what I wrote.’

He didn’t seem pleased by this criticism, and to express his annoyance he said, ‘I think I’d better tune up again.’

Knowing that this would take some time, I left him to it, and went to find the lavatory.

It was either on the first floor or the second floor — after you’d gone across all those little landings, and up and down so many stairs, it was impossible to be sure — and when I came to find my way back to our studio, I got lost again. Just as I thought I knew where I was going, the lights went off (they were on some kind of time switch) and I had to grope my way along a pitch black corridor. At the end of the corridor, I found myself up against a locked door. It was very quiet. I was about to turn back, when I suddenly thought that I had heard a voice. I could have sworn that I heard a voice shout something behind the door — but as if from a distance. I could tell that the voice (which was male) was shouting quite loud, although the noise was heavily muffled by the door. Then again, perhaps I was imagining it. I stood there for a few seconds, straining to hear more, and then a hand gripped my shoulder. At the same time, the lights came back on, and I found that I was standing outside the door to Studio B, with Vincent’s face pushed up close to mine.

‘Oy, Rumpelstiltsken!’ he said. ‘What the fuck do you think you’re doing?’

‘I was lost,’ I said.

‘Get away from there, will you? Your room’s bloody miles away. Come on, follow me.’

He tried the studio door, to make sure it was still locked, then led me away.

‘Sorry about this,’ I said. ‘It’s just that it’s hard to find your way around this place sometimes.’

‘You’ve been here often enough,’ he said; but he seemed to be making an effort to let his anger subside. ‘Anyway, how’s it going tonight? Getting plenty done, are you?’

‘We’re rehearsing this piece for Tuesday,’ I explained. ‘You know, that session you’re going to produce for us?’

The reminder seemed to cause him no particular pleasure. We weren’t keen on the thought of a whole day in the studio with Vincent, either, but he came with the price of the session, and none of us knew how to operate an 8-track desk ourselves. At least he was experienced, if his own stories were to be believed.

I rejoined the others and for the next couple of hours concentration was high and the rehearsal went fairly well. I forgot about the voices I thought I had heard behind the locked door of Studio B. By ten o’clock, ‘Stranger in a Foreign Land’ seemed to be shaping up nicely, and Harry was just about getting the hang of the rather wide-ranging vocal line, when all of a sudden Martin screamed ‘STOP!’ at the top of his voice, threw down his guitar, and stood there with his hands on his hips, listening intently. We watched him in fear.

‘Where’s that hiss coming from?’ he asked eventually.

‘What hiss?’

‘I can’t hear any hiss.’

‘The speakers are hissing. Can’t you hear it? It’s deafening!’

We listened for a while and then Harry said, in a conciliatory way, ‘Well, it’s not as if we need a perfect sound right now, this is only a rehearsal — ’

Martin stamped his foot and said, ‘God, this band is so technologically… illiterate! You’re all such bloody — ’ Then he stiffened again. ‘What’s that crackle?’

‘What crackle?’

‘I didn’t hear any crackle.’

‘Sorry, that was me,’ said Jake, who had opened a packet of crisps.

Harry made the mistake of laughing.

‘Right! That’s it!’ Martin shouted, and started unplugging his guitar and packing it away. ‘I don’t see why I should go on playing with a bunch of amateurs, who don’t even realize the importance of having a good sound. It’s like banging your head against a wall, playing in this band. There’s no professionalism, no commitment…’ He picked up his guitar case, made for the exit, and said, before departing and slamming the door, ‘Once and for all: I quit.’

He was gone, and there was a short silence. Then Jake put down his sticks, and began to take the drum kit apart.

‘Well, there we go,’ he sighed. ‘Another hour of studio time down the drain.’

None of us were unduly worried, because this was at least the fifteenth time that Martin had threatened to leave. Usually he would just turn up at the next rehearsal without saying anything about it. It wasn’t worth chasing after him: Harry lit up a cigarette, and I played through a few choruses of ‘Autumn Leaves’. The atmosphere in the studio was tired rather than tense.

‘Chester phoned up,’ Harry said, after a while.

I stopped playing.

‘Yes?’

‘He thinks it would be a good idea if we all got together and had a talk.’

‘Fine.’

‘Sunday lunchtime, at The White Goat.’

‘Fine.’

‘I’ll call Martin and tell him, shall I?’

Harry and Jake decided to go to the kebab shop, but I couldn’t face it. I got a bus back from Borough High Street and managed to persuade the driver to let me bring the keyboard on. The bus only took me to within half a mile of the flat, so I had to walk the rest of the way; with a few pauses for sitting down and getting my breath back, I was able to do it in about twenty minutes. I didn’t even meet any winos or kids this time, although there seemed to be some kind of trouble going on in the chip shop. These two blokes had got the owner up against the wall. It looked as if they were trying to rob the till or something. I didn’t feel like getting involved.

I arrived back at the flat and was about to turn the television on, thinking that there might be an Open University programme worth watching, when I noticed that the green light was flashing on our answering machine. There were no messages for me, though. It was Pedro again.

‘Hola, Tina, it’s only me, ringing to find out how are you feeling, my little dumpling. You know, you shouldn’t have upset me by crying like that and calling me names, especially names like that which I’m surprised to be known to a lady of your persuasion. Anyway, I hope you’re feeling better and I suppose I’m sorry about what happened last night, I suppose I got a little bit carried off, and I hope I didn’t hurt you or things like that. You know, in Spain, men and women, we do things like this all the time, but maybe you English ladies are a bit less uninhabited. Anyway, I’ll come around tonight again, if you still want to see me, and maybe we can pick things up where we got off. OK?’

There was a long pause.

‘I’m sorry.’

The machine clicked off.