Wasted Years

Seven

The way Keith felt about his old man, one of those old jossers get on the bus in the morning and suddenly you’re staring out the window, hoping against hope they won’t lurch over, sit down next to you. Clothes that reek of cider and cheap port wine. Open their mouths to speak and the next you know, they’re dribbling uncontrollably.

An exaggeration, of course, but not much of one. The way his dad had gone since the divorce, starting his drinking earlier and earlier in the day, not finishing till the money or the energy to lift the bottle failed him. Last time Keith had called at the house, two in the morning, unannounced, his father was curled asleep on the kitchen floor, arms cradled around the legs of an upright chair.

It hadn’t always been like that. As a young kid, Keith remembered his dad getting smartened up of an evening, loading his gear into the van, swinging Keith round by his arms till he screamed with excitement. Early hours of the morning, Keith would wake to the sound of car doors slamming in the street outside, called farewells, his dad’s footsteps, less than steady, on the stairs, his mother’s warning voice, “Don’t wake the boy.”

His father would sleep till two or three, wander down for a sausage-and-egg sandwich and pots of tea. Wash, shave, do it all again.

He had been drinking, Keith realized, even then; more, probably, than had been clear at the time. Clear to Keith, at least, though he could still hear his mother’s shrill sermons echoing up and down the narrow house. And as the work had dried up, the bottles and the cans had appeared on every surface, lined the chair where his dad would sit, not watching the TV. “One thing,” he would say, over and over, “one thing, Keith, I regret-you never knew me when I was big, really big. Then you might’ve felt different.”

Keith fished the key from his pocket and turned it in the lock. Found the light switch without thinking. Strange how long this had been home.

“Keith, that you?”

No, it was Mick jagger, Charlie Watts’d finally decided to jack it in, old Mick couldn’t think of anyone better to take his place.

Around when Keith had been twelve and thirteen and you didn’t have to be a genius to see how far things had fallen apart, that was the kind of guff his dad would sit him down, make him listen to. How he could have played with the Stones, back in the early days, Eel Pie Island, before Mick started on the eye makeup, all that poncing about. Back when they were playing real music.

Playing the blues.

“Keith?”

“Yeh, it’s me. Who d’you think?”

All the bands his old man could have played with if things had only fallen right: the Yardbirds before Jeff Beck, John Mayall’s Blues Breakers, Graham Bond, Zoot Money’s Big Roll Band. The night he should have depped for Mickey Wailer with the Steampacket, some big festival-instead of sitting behind the drums, his dad had popped too many pills and spent the set in the St John Ambulance tent throwing up.

“Keith, you’re coming down here, fetch us a beer.”

As far as Keith knew, his father’s only substantiated nights of near-glory had been back in sixty-four when he gigged with Jimmy Powell and the Five Dimensions, joining them in Nottingham when they were on the Mecca circuit and sticking it out until they were hired to back Chuck Berry on his British tour. First rehearsal, Chuck stopped short in the middle of his duck walk and asked who the motherfucker was trying to play the drums. That was it: beginning and end of his old man’s big career. For sale, one pair of Zildjian cymbals, one mohair suit, scarcely worn.

“Keith, I thought I asked you to …”

“Here. Catch.”

The can bounced out of Reg Rylands’s hands and rolled across the basement floor.

“What you doing down here?” Keith asked, snapping open the Carlsberg he’d fetched for himself.

“Oh, you know, pottering around.”

Keith grunted and snapped open his can.

“What’s that you’ve done to your eye?”

“That?” Keith said, gingerly touching the swelling, the bruise. “That’s nothing.”

The house was two-story, flat-fronted, an end-terrace in the Meadows-one of those streets the planners overlooked when they ordered in the bulldozers on their way to a new Jerusalem. Keith had been born here, brought up; his mum had moved out when she divorced, lived now in a semi in Gedling with a painter and decorator and Keith’s five-year-old stepbrother, Jason. Keith’s father had stayed put, letting out first one room, then another, sharing the house with an ever-changing mixture of plasterers and general laborers and drinking mates who dossed down for free whenever their Social Security ran out

“What’s this?” Keith asked, pointing at the Z-bed opened out along the wall. “You sleeping down here now?”

“Just for a bit. Coz’s got my room.” He drank some lager. “You remember Cozzie. Some woman with him this time. Tart.”

Keith didn’t know any Cozzie, but he could guess what he would look like: tattoos across his knuckles and scabs down his face. “Hope he’s paying you.”

“’Course.”

Which meant that he was not.

“So what you doing here?”

Keith shrugged. “Come to see you, didn’t I?”

“You weren’t thinking of staying?”

“Thought I might.”

“What’s wrong with your mum’s?”

“Nothing.”

“Haven’t had a row?”

“No more’n usual.”

“So?”

“Change, that’s all. Couple of nights.”

“You’re not in trouble?”

“No.”

“You sure?”

“Yes.”

“Cause if it’s anything like before …”

Keith hurled his half-full lager can at the floor and stormed towards the door.

“No, Keith, Keith, hold on, hold on. I’m sorry, right?”

Keith stopped, feet on the cellar steps.

“You want to stay, that’s fine. Got a mattress I can bring down here, you take the bed.” Keith turned and came back inside. “Just for tonight. Bloke up top, moving out next couple of days. I’ll explain. Give him a nudge. It’ll work out, you see. Here …” He bent down and picked up the Carlsberg and handed it back to his son. “Like old times, eh?”

“Yeh.”

“Might go out later, couple of pints. What d’you think?”

Keith sat down on the Z-bed and it rattled and squeaked. In an old chest opposite, fronts missing from two of the drawers, were his father’s clothes-those that weren’t draped anyhow across a succession of cardboard boxes or hanging from the back of the cellar door. A pile of shoes from which it might be difficult to find a decent pair. Bundles of old newspapers and magazines, yellowing copies of the NME. An old Ferguson record player with only one speaker: a radio without a back. Two snare drums, not on stands, but lying side by side, skins patched and slack. A pair of wire brushes, bent and tangled at the ends.

“Yeh,” Keith said. “Yes, sure. Drink’d be fine.” He looked quickly at his father from the corner of his good eye. “You might have to pay.”