“Quantum physics, Matty. It’s quantum, not quantus.” “Right, whatever. The thing is, it’s best to play it cool. Tell them they’ve got a nice dress on or something.”
“A nice dress?”
“Yeah, or nice eyes maybe.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. Or sometimes you don’t even have to bother. Ritchie from Scarface just says “Do you fancy coming to the toilets and giving me a quick blow-job?” Just like that. No hello, no preamble, no how d’you do. Nothing.”
“So what you’re saying is that I should play it thick?”
“Yes, well… no, not exactly thick.”
“You reckon I should treat every girl I meet like she’s a bag of chopped mince, then, do you?”
“No, ‘course not, I didn’t say that.”
“OK then. What exactly are you saying? Where precisely is it that you think I’m going wrong?”
“Well,” says Matty cunningly, ‘that’s just it, Vince. You have to learn these sorts of things for yourself.”
That did it. He’s on a mission now. He’s definitely on a mission.
“Phwoar… Vince… steady on … you smell like a poodle at a pet parlour.”
“Yeah, well, you know, you have to make the effort, don’t you.”
“Is it for the groupies or the journalist?”
“What do you think?”
“Well, I don’t know. Maybe if you shag the journalist we’ll get a better review.”
“I ain’t going to shag the journalist, Danny. No one is.”
“How do you mean? I thought Scarface were lining him up with a couple of women.”
“Yeah, well, they always do that. Doesn’t do him any good, though.”
“Why not?”
“He can’t get it up.”
“Can’t he?”
“No, he’s well known for it. All the bands line him up with
girls to boost his ego and that, but Malcolm reckons he’s impotent.”
“Maybe he just doesn’t fancy the girls.”
“No, mate, he does. Cries his eyes out apparently.”
“Wow. Poor sod.”
“Yeah. Poor sod.”
“Vince?”
“Yeah?”
“Do you reckon the fact that he can’t get it up is likely to make him give us a better or worse review?”
“Don’t know, mate. All I know is that I haven’t got laid for five months myself and if I don’t manage it tonight I’m hanging up me lead singer badge and going home for good.”
“Hey, don’t worry, Vince. I’m sure it’ll happen for you soon. You just need to relax a bit more.”
“Matty, did anyone give you permission to speak?”
“No, Vince. They didn’t.”
“Well then?”
“Right. Sorry. I’ll shut up.”
Tonight’s gig is the best one yet. We’ve been doing the odd local radio interview here and there and we’ve managed a couple of half-decent write-ups in the local press, and word seems to be getting round that we might be worth turning up early for. The crowds are definitely beginning to get into it. They’re cheering more and moshing more and a lot of them seem to be talking about us in the crowd. I know. I’ve checked. All we need now is to convince the sound man to start giving us a break and we might actually be on to something.
“Malcolm,” I say, as we stand at the side of the stage waiting for Scarface to go on, ‘do you think you could have a quick word with the sound guy again? I know he’s not going to make us sound as good as Scarface but, you know, if you could just get him to turn us up a bit and sort out all the feedback problems we’ve been having.”
Till see what I can do, Danny. I promise. I’ll have another word.”
“Really?”
“Yeah,” he says uneasily. “But… it’s not that simple.”
“Why not?”
“Well,” he says, taking his Maglite out of his pocket and signalling the stage manager to bring down the house lights, ‘do I have to spell it out for you?”
“Ike?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“It is, isn’t it? Ike’s put the word out that he wants us sounding like shit up there.”
“Yeah, well,” he says cautiously, ‘you didn’t hear it from me.”
It’s a big night back in the dressing room; we’re exactly halfway through the tour and everyone is clearly on for a bit of a bender. It’s a fairly typical scene. Ritchie from Scarface is cutting out lines of cocaine on the buffet table, Malcolm is handing round plastic beakers of champagne spiked with vodka, Matty is sitting in the corner chatting to the music journalist, and Vince is messing with his hair and changing into his best pulling shirt.
A few groupies have already made their way to the dressing room courtesy of the special backstage passes Malcolm has given them. The passes have numbers scratched on the back in red ink. Malcolm has already graded them. And marked them out of ten.
The party starts to move up a gear. The whole of Scarface are lining up for their groupies and their nostrilfuls of coke but I don’t bother joining the queue. I need to get out of here. I need to get some fresh air. I need to take a walk and clear my head, and most of all I need to come up with a way to stop Ike from screwing us over onstage.
It takes me a good half-hour to walk back to the hotel, and by
the time I arrive at the bar everyone is already three-quarters cut. Ritchie is playing the theme tune from Rocky 4 on the hotel piano and the rest of Scarface are sat around drinking tequila slammers and picking their way through a plate of dried-up sandwiches and crisps. Vince is nowhere to be seen, and I’m hoping that maybe he’s finally got lucky. Matty is off his tits. He’s clearly had a bang or two on Scarface’s drugs and he’s sitting at their table nursing a pint while Ike sips measures of ten-quid-a-throw whisky and dishes out words of wisdom to his doting entourage: the time he bent a low-league super model over the back of a toilet seat and fucked her up the arse; the time he told a fat teenage groupie that she was ugly but that he was going to do her a favour and screw her anyway; the time he stuffed a rotten banana down his pissed drummer’s underpants so that he woke up the next morning thinking he’d shat himself. Everyone thinks he’s hilarious. Obviously.
As I get closer to Scarface’s table I can tell that Ike is pretty fucked up. His pupils are badly blown and he’s having trouble focusing as he watches me cross the room. He has an idea. Something is amusing him. His molten, rubber face struggles to support the beginnings of a smile, and he decides to turn his attention to Matty. He wants to chat. He has some extra-special words of wisdom. Just for him.
“Listen up, Matthew,” he drawls, topping his glass up with Scotch. “I might not bother to talk to you for the rest of this tour so pay close attention.”
“Right. Wow. OK.”
“It’s simple this music-business game.”
“Is it?”
“Yeah, dude, it is. One rule. All the girls have to want to shag you and all the blokes have to want to be you. Easy as that.”
“Right… cool,” says Matty, nodding gently over his pint glass. “I see what you mean.”
“That’s where you’re going wrong with this little band of yours.”
“Is it?”
“Yeah. You care about the music too much. Especially your fucking singer, what’s his name, Gordon, is it? Anyway, he’s got it all wrong. It’s all about the look. The look is everything, man. It’s five per cent talent, ten per cent slog, eighty per cent image and ten per cent luck. You wanna remember that. Now then, how’s about you be a good boy and run over to the bar and fetch me another little drink?”
can’t stand it. I can’t stand to see him humiliating Matty like this. Something snaps. Maybe it’s because he picked on me in school for all those years; maybe it’s the injustice of him making it big instead of me. Maybe it’s because he’s a coked up, witless little fuck who can’t even add up to a hundred.
I move quickly. I step into Matty’s seat and make a grab for Ike’s wrist as he reaches over for his cigarettes.
“You’re wrong,” I say, picking up his soft-pack of Marlboro and helping myself.
“I don’t think I am, dude,” he says, trying (and failing) to meet my gaze.
“Yeah you are,” I say carefully. “It’s all about talent. Sad thing is, you haven’t got any. That’s why you’re paying your sound guy to screw us over night after night.”
“Bullshit, man,” he says, grinning at me. “You’re just crap. You sound like shit coz you play like shit.”
“That’s not true,” I say, leaning across the table and exhaling a thick stream of smoke past his face. “You’re scared, Ike. You took us on tour because you were too scared to take anyone else. You thought we’d be a soft touch. You didn’t think we’d be any kind of competition.”
Ike snorts and fumbles to light a cigarette with his shaky fingers.
“But that wasn’t the way it worked out, was it? Turns out that we’re ten times the band you are and you’re so threatened by it you go out of your way to have us fucked over. You’re a coward, Ike. A miserable fucking coward. Always were, always will be.”
And then I get up. And walk away. I don’t know what came over me. I’ve never done anything like that in my life. Perhaps the whole Bruges debacle has affected me more than I thought. Perhaps this would be a good time to celebrate my new-found courage with a hotel sandwich and a well-earned drink. Perhaps this would be a good time to go back up to the room and call my girlfriend.
“Hey, it’s me.” “Danny?”
“Yeah, sorry. I didn’t wake you up, did I?” “No, it’s OK,” she says. “I’m really glad you called.” She sounds sleepy. She sounds sexy and husky and very far away, and I think the fact that she was just about to go to bed has caught her slightly off guard. She doesn’t seem as cross with me as she was. She asks me how things are going with the band and I ask her how things are going with her job, and even though there’s a part of both of us that is still treading on eggshells, we have a better conversation than we’ve managed ” for days.
Maybe it’s because we avoid talking about anything sensitive. Maybe it’s because I summon up my last morsel of pride and avoid mentioning anything to do with Didier. I stick to the basics. I tell her all about the contents of our well-pillaged minibar. I tell her about the flat-screen television on the wall and the miniature speakerphone in the loo, and I tell her all about Ike screwing us over onstage. She sounds sympathetic. She says we should splash out and organise our own sound man for the London show. She says that she’s looking forward to seeing me.
I tell her that I’m missing her too.
As soon as I put down the phone to Alison I hear a volley of swearing from the corridor. It’s Vince. He’s forgotten his key. Again.
“Sorry, Danny,” he says after I let him in. “It’s them fucking bits of plastic. I can never seem to keep track of ‘em.”
“Don’t worry about it,” I say, handing him a can of beer and flicking the telly on. “Where’ve you been anyway?”
“Oh, you know. Here and there.”
“Out on the shag?”
“No. Not as such.”
“What d’you mean, not as such}’
“What I say. Not as such.”
Vince opens his beer and I wait for him to explain himself. He looks knackered. He looks troubled. He looks every inch of his thirty-three and a half years.
“What is it with me, eh?” he says after a while. “How come I can’t get me end away any more? I’m not a bad-looking bloke, am I? I used to do all right. I was pulling all the time in our Agent Orange days. Wasn’t I? Wasn’t I always pulling in our Agent Orange days?”
“Yeah, Vince. You were.”
“So what’s wrong with me now, then? It’s my hair, isn’t it? It’s because I’m losing my hair.”
“Vince, you’re not losing your hair.”
“Of course I am, you soft bastard. Look.”
“What? There’s nothing to look at.”
“Exactly.”
“No, I mean it, it’s fine. I’m telling you, Vince, there’s nothing wrong with your fucking hair. There never has been.”
“Well,” he says, draining his first beer and opening another, ‘that’s even worse, then.”
“How? How can it be worse?”
“Because it means it’s something more serious. Something fundamental. If it’s not my hair then it must mean she just thought I was a prat.”
“Vince?”
“Yeah.”
“You want to tell me what happened?”
“Not particularly, no.”
“You’re going to, though, right?”
“Absolutely.”
“A spiteful hand-job?”
“Yeah. Nearly had the end of me knob off, she did. I feel like I’ve got sunburn of the knob. It don’t make no sense Matty’s busy getting himself a knicker collection to rival Tom Jones’s and all I’m getting is a toothy snog and a spiteful bleedin’ hand-job.”
“How old was she?”
“I don’t know. What difference does it make?”
“How old was she?”
“I dunno. I dunno?
“Vince?”
“Twenty-three.”
“Twenty-three?”
“Eighteen.”
“Eighteen?”
“Seventeen, then, she was seventeen. She was seventeen years old with skinny tits and long hair and a bum like a bagful of conkers. What you gonna do, have me arrested?”
“Course not.”
“Good, because the last thing I need is you coming over all moral majority on me.”
“So,” I say, watching Vince pace round the room, ‘where is she now, then?”
“I took her home, didn’t I?”
“Did you?”
“Yeah. How sad is that? I got her a minicab but the bloke looked sort of dodgy so I got in the cab with her and saw her home. Just to make sure. You know. I didn’t want nothing to happen to her.”
“Far, was it?”
“Yes, mate, it was. It was very fucking far. It was halfway to bleedin’ Edinburgh.”
“Grateful, was she?”
“Not particularly, no. She said I was boring.”
“Boring?”
“Yeah. She said I was less fun than her rheumatic granddad and was there any way I could sort it out for her to shag one or two of Scarface at Monday night’s gig in Leeds. She said I owed her one.”
“How come?”
“Well,” he says gloomily, ‘turns out she only done me the spiteful in the first place coz she thought I might introduce her to Ike.”
Vince slumps down on the bed and tucks into his second beer. He stares at the floor and tugs hard on his cigarette, and by the way he’s pummelling his temples with his fingertips, I can tell that he’s trying to make some sense out of it all.
“Still,” he says, taking some tobacco out of his pocket and starting on another roll-up, ‘it’s my own fault. I mean, it’s rubbish, isn’t it, it’s sad, a bloke like me, running around smelling of poodles and trying to get off with sarcastic teenagers half my age?”