Educating Peter (12 page)

I wasn't in Cambridge because I was enchanted by Barrett's art; I was in Cambridge because I was enchanted by his legend, or at least my own romanticised version of it, and, in a way, I felt even that was losing its appeal, now I'd stopped pretending that I liked his music. All in all, I wasn't quite sure what Peter and I were looking for – neither in a spiritual sense, nor a physical one. Yet I felt that the search was a necessary stage in Peter's personal musical evolution. Every would-be rock artisan went through a Barrett phase – or something similar – at some point on the way to attaining true manhood. Now was as good a time as any for Peter to get his out of the way.

The only question was: where did we start? My mental picture of Barrett still came from a photograph, taken during the late Sixties, which showed him looking slim, ruffled, kaftaned and tassled. I knew, though, from the photos that had been snatched outside his house in the Eighties, that I should be hunting for
something considerably less graceful: a rotund, inelegant, severely balding figure, staring at something at least 3,000 miles behind the camera lens.

‘So what you've got to look out for,' I explained to Peter, ‘is some kind of cross-fertilisation of Benny from
Crossroads
, Marlon Brando, and the Michael Jackson impersonator from
The Simpsons
.'

‘Who's Benny from
Crossroads
?' said Peter.

In truth, I wasn't sure if we
did
want to find Barrett. I had no intention of doorstepping him, and, even if I did have, I wouldn't have wanted to do it with Peter in tow. Instead, I carried with me to Cambridge a nebulous idea of drifting around the city's parks, bike lanes and student bookshops on the off-chance of bumping into him. But I wondered if at root my plan wasn't even vaguer than that. I wanted to meet Syd's 2002 incarnation even less than I wanted to meet Brian Wilson's 2002 incarnation, and I wanted Peter to meet him even less. What I wanted to do was follow the ghost of his twenty-something self (Barrett was, after all, in terms of cult status, the nearest thing to a dead rock star, hence perfectly entitled to his own ghost). I wanted to sit where he had sat, to picture what he had worn, to see the world, just for a moment, the way he had seen it – though not in any psychologically damaging way. Then I wanted to see if Peter could do the same.

‘So picture the scene,' I said to Peter, as we sat on the banks of the River Cam, watching a lone punt brave the bracing spring air. ‘You're a former maverick songwriter – some would say a genius. But you want to hide from the world indefinitely. You want
somewhere sophisticated yet olde worlde, somewhere full of young people, to help give you a preserved sense of youth. Somewhere you can feel like you're still a part of something, but go about your business without being hassled. This seems like the perfect place, doesn't it?'

‘I suppose so,' said Peter. ‘It's . . . got a lot of good-looking girls.'

‘But suppose you're Syd Barrett,' I said. ‘Say you're coming here in the mid-Seventies to ponder your lot in life. You've freaked out and left your band, and they've become multi-millionaires, and you're plunged back into obscurity. What would you be thinking?'

‘Well, it depends if you're mad or not, doesn't it? I mean, listening to that stuff you had on in the van, I wasn't quite sure. He could have been putting it on.'

‘Well, think about both scenarios. What would you think about if you were mad, and what would you think about if you weren't mad?'

‘Well, if you were mad, you'd probably be thinking about onions or skirting boards or something. And if you weren't mad . . . well, I guess you'd be thinking about that blonde girl with the rucksack over there.'

‘But this is 1974. She wouldn't be here.'

‘Her mum might.'

‘Good point.'

The two of us stared towards the opposite bank for a moment, lost in thought.

‘You know mad people, when they talk really loud on the bus about onions and stuff?' said Peter. ‘Have you ever thought what they might do if you talked about onions back to them even louder?'

‘Quite frequently, actually.'

‘But I bet you've never tried it.'

‘No. Never had the guts.'

In the mid-term sun, Cambridge bustled, and Peter and I sucked absent-mindedly on the cola-flavoured laces that I'd purchased from a sweet stall at an outdoor market. It was an easy place in which to let your mind drift. Lecturer-types hurtled past us on wobbly bikes, riding no-handed, gaggles of Japanese students laid out cloths for picnics; the world felt momentarily right, and as we made our way past the majestic façade of King's College, I wouldn't have been surprised if Peter and I had been thinking exactly the same thing: not ‘I wonder if we'll find Syd Barrett?' so much as ‘Wouldn't this be an ace place to be young?' After a visit to Hot Numbers, a musty second-hand record shop tucked away unusually on a residential street towards the railway line, we'd been directed by the shop's proprietor to the Millpond, a notoriously tranquil corner of the city which, it was rumoured, still provided one of Barrett's favourite pondering spots. But all we'd discovered there were more students, and now we found our attention distracted from Barrett all too easily. Or, at least, I found mine distracted. I wasn't so sure Peter's had been on him in the first place. As we walked across the city, idly taking in the day, every twenty minutes or so I'd hear my impassive friend emit a low grunt. At each of these grunts I'd start slightly and turn round, under the impression that he was talking to me, only to find him muttering insouciantly into his palm-size mobile phone, which was set to vibrate rather than ring
(somehow, Peter didn't seem like a ring-tone kind of guy). These conversations were short yet frequent, and would consist solely of words with one syllable, or sometimes less. ‘Hi.' ‘Yeh.' ‘Nnn.' ‘Ggg.' ‘Cool.' ‘Mmm.' ‘Tmrrow.' ‘Jjj.' ‘W.' ‘Ha.' ‘Sure.' ‘See ya.' I could vaguely remember my own self-inflicted problems with communication as a teenager – a particularly recalcitrant ‘wounded bison noises' phase surrounding my thirteenth birthday sprang to mind – but even at my most monosyllabic, I'd never spoken in a language remotely like the one Peter was speaking in now. ‘At times you may be embarrassed because you may suddenly produce a squeak when you're talking,' Elizabeth Fenwick and Dr Tony Smith had warned teenagers in
Adolescence: The Survival Guide
, but this was something else altogether. Was it really possible to form a meaningful conversation with this few officially recognised words?

I was impressed. Before, I'd imagined that it was only me, Jenny and Ian whom Peter was reticent towards, but, compared to his friends, it was clear that we had it easy.

‘What was that about?' I asked him, unable to suppress my curiosity, after he'd clicked the phone shut for the fourth time.

‘Just a mate. Wanted some help with this computer game I lent him.'

‘What? You mean he couldn't work out how to switch on the console or something?'

‘No. There are these samurai bats that you have to get past to get to level six, and he wanted to know how to do it.'

‘And you told him how to do it just now?'

He ripped open a bag of pickled-onion-flavour Monster Munch. ‘Yeah.'

‘But you barely said three words to him.'

‘Well, it's pretty simple, once you get the hang of it.'

‘Is he a friend you don't like very much?'

‘No. That was Quentin – he's totally okay, like really cool.'

The rest of the afternoon had a reassuring pattern to it which, while not quite what I'd hoped for, proved to be a pleasantly laid-back contrast to our encounters with Ed The Troubadour and Brian Wilson. While Peter rumbled into his mobile phone and played Spot The Band T-Shirt, I ogled architecture, browsed in shops selling furniture that I could never afford, and fantasised about a parallel universe where I hadn't dropped out of higher education three months into my first term. Cambridge, while annoyingly tourist-heavy, was undoubtedly a happening city, though not in quite the way I'd imagined. It was the kind of place that you assumed would have more second-hand bookshops, record shops and subterranean hang-outs than it did. The few of these places that were left seemed to be empty or poorly stocked, and the employees, when asked for Barrett gossip, would shrug blankly, or look off into the distance, as if remembering something surprisingly mundane from another lifetime. ‘You hear stories,' said a bespectacled man in a tiny, ailing bookshop, which, when I revisited the city a few weeks later, had vanished entirely. ‘Stories about him riding his bike by the river. But not so much now. People
don't care so much any more.' ‘Syd Barrett? No. Is he one of them rappers?' said a man serving in a café, who'd lived in Cambridge since the early Sixties. At least if Barrett had died, like Hendrix or Jim Morrison or Keith Moon or the other cult heroes he was mentioned alongside, he'd have a plaque or some graffiti or a lavish gravestone. As it was, he had nothing – not even the attention of the local population. But perhaps that's the way he'd wanted it all along.

Back on the streets, the academics were heading home to book-lined townhouses and pet cats with names like Kafka and Mailer, the American tourists were asking the hotdog sellers moronic questions (‘Does this river, like, lead directly to Oxford? 'Cos that's the next town, right?'), the Japanese girls were folding up their picnic blankets, and, in the bigger gaps between the lot of them, it was possible to spot an unusually large number of men who resembled Benny-from-
Crossroads
two decades on. It was a good city to hide in if you were a spherical man on the runway to old age. It was also a city with great furniture shops, fudge shops, clothes shops and chain stores – a city whose quaintness was preserved via institutions and buildings, rather than gig venues, bohemian eateries or retail outlets. The place seemed somehow beyond Syd Barrett. And while he was surely still here somewhere, painting or being diabetic or hanging out in someone's local pub or having a picnic or gardening or having a secret party with Brian Eno, his ghost had obviously skipped town aeons ago.

‘
IT WAS REALLY
funny. There was this party the other week – at my mate Catherine's? – and for a trick, me and Raf and Jim – he's like this bloke with a massive head who everyone calls “Cauliflower” – decided to put pants on our heads and take a vow of silence for a laugh.'

‘I hope they were clean pants. Whose were they?'

‘They were Catherine's brother's. He was out. So, anyway, we're just sitting there in the living room with these jockey shorts on our heads, and Catherine's mum comes in early from her yoga class and sees us and she's like, “What are you doing?”, and we're like just sitting there shrugging, 'cos Raf's said that if any of us speak or take the pants off our head before midnight then we have to run around the middle of the road shouting, “I am the chicken God!” as a penalty.'

‘That's quite an elaborate penalty.'

‘Yeah. If you knew Raf, you probably wouldn't think so.'

‘So what happened in the end?'

‘Yeah, right. It was so cool. In the end, Sophie – that's Catherine's mum? – had picked the phone up and was threatening to call Raf's mum if we carried on not saying anything, and she's just dialled the number when Raf stood up, threw the pants across the room – they landed on this, like, really expensive lamp and it nearly fell off the table – and ran out the door.'

‘What, he went home? And left you to talk your way out of it?'

‘Yeah, it was kind of okay, though. Sophie's quite cool. We stayed up till about eleven talking about
The Simpsons
and stuff.'

‘Do you drink alcohol at these parties?'

‘Sometimes. This girl had to have her stomach pumped after this one time. But normally it's not that mad. I don't really drink much 'cos I don't like the taste. And sometimes parents are there anyway.'

‘You seem to go to a lot more parties than I went to at your age. I'm jealous. For me it was just the school disco at the leisure centre a couple of times a year. Everyone would go down the off-licence and get shit-loads of Special Brew, then we'd watch Johnno Reed – he was a complete nobcheese – snap a load of wing mirrors off cars on the road to school – this was when I was a bit older than you are now, probably fifteen – then we'd go and punch the air to Simple Minds, and get off with people we didn't like. I once got off with this nerdy girl with braces who I pretended I didn't like, but actually did, and called her “Jaws” at school the next day. About four years later I met her again and she was really gorgeous and she said she was going to go out with me, then decided she didn't want to after
all, because of what I'd said about her before. It was either that or the fact that when I kissed her my Dead Kennedys hat got in the way. Sorry – I'll shut up. You probably don't want to hear about that . . .'

‘Mmmnff. All sounds . . . weird.'

‘Are all your mates' parents really cool and groovy?'

‘Not all, but, yeah, most I guess. It's kind of frustrating.'

‘How do you mean? Because you can't rebel against them?'

‘Sort of. I dunno. My dad's always going on about how much he likes stuff like The Manic Street Preachers and Rage Against The Machine, but I'm not sure if he really does.'

‘Does he ever shout at you to turn stuff down when you're at his place?'

‘When he's working, sometimes, but not much.'

‘What about your mum?'

‘Neh. Well . . . I'm not sure. She's kind of cool about everything. She just worries about my schoolwork, mostly.'