nose.
‘Never touched the fuckin dog!’ he uttered. ‘Nothin went anywhere near him.’
But was that a note of repentance in his voice?
The TV had blacked out instantly and Billy went to inspect the damage.
‘Aw, nice one, man! You’ve smashed it!’ he declared, crouching down in front of it. ‘Well done, eh! You can buy another one!’
Taking a long, last deep breath Tony pushed himself upright off the sill.
‘Let me fuckin see it,’ he sighed. ‘It’s probably not that bad.’
‘Not that bad!’ cried Billy. ‘How is it not that bad? Look at it, man! It’s ruined!’
Tony crouched down beside him and pensively ran the tip of an investigatory finger over a perfectly straight hairline crack in the screen that extended diagonally from just above his own left shoulder to down below Billy’s right knee.
‘Hmm!’ he said, and he switched the TV off, and on, and off again.
He stood back up and took half a step backwards, motioning to Billy to move out of his light, and, thoughtfully fingering his chin dimple, first cocked his head one way, then cocked it the other, as though earnestly seeking a solution.
‘Hmm!’ he said again.
‘Oh, what?’ said Billy. ‘You think you can fix it?’
‘Nah,’ said Tony. ‘I was just wonderin what would happen…if I did…THIS!’
And he violently thrust the heel of his front foot straight through the centre of the screen.
The television crashed backwards into the corner dragging his leg along with it, so that he was awkwardly straddling its stand. Steadying himself with a hand on either wall he dislodged his foot from the screen, pausing, only briefly, to consider the blood that was seeping through his sock at the ankle. Then, with a renewed fury that wholly eclipsed his suffering and seemed to render him insensible to the pain he must surely have been causing himself, he stamp, stamp, stamp, stamp…stamped...and…stamped! almost all of the remaining glass from the screen, leaving nothing but the four jagged edges.
‘Now get yourself fuckin ready!’ he breathed. ‘We’re goin to the fuckin gig!’
18
And from that day (of their little tete-a-tete) to this Tony had seen neither hide nor hair of Steve Steve. However, true to his word, he had been in touch, albeit via a third party (Don) who had informed Tony that, surprise sur-fuckin-prise, the record had under performed; that it had failed, despite ample radio play, to find an audience in Europe or the Home Counties, to say nothing of the US and Asia, and that a revised strategy was to be put into effect forthwith. Which was a typically long-winded way of saying the record was shite and they were now trying desperately to recover their costs.
This revised strategy, Tony was told, involved first generating a healthy local interest and then utilising that interest to reach a wider home-based audience, before using that audience, as evidence of a sort, to convince an even wider international audience that blah blah blah… Hence, Asda. But Tony knew that good, like truth, will out, and was in no need of such convoluted measures to promote it. If something is truly good, he believed, it is universally good, and through word of mouth alone it will spread like wildfire and effortlessly conquer the world. And if that was going to happen in his own case it would have happened long before now.
So why then was he still sitting here?
Hope, it seems, though often born prematurely, dies hard, and that initial phone call, enquiring whether he would like to make a record, had immediately elevated those long-suppressed dreams of stardom, that he, like everyone else, harboured, to the level of a real and tangible hope. His scepticism was no match for it. And even when that scepticism had proven only too well founded, hope, blind hope, remained.
Hope of what exactly?
Hope, quite simply, of a better life. Hope of becoming someone more in keeping with the idea he had always had of himself. Hope of escape from the humiliating mundanity of his day-to-day existence so at odds with that idea. And, okay, all right, hope of never having to work again. Steve Steve might pride himself on his powers of persuasion but for all his spin and spiel these were about the only words of his that had struck any sort of a chord in Tony, because was that not what he’d been thinking all along? That this record might, just might, make him money enough so that never again would he have to spend half his waking life being somewhere he would rather not be, doing some pointless thing he would really rather not be doing. That it might, just might, make him money enough so that never again would he have to don a corporate identity – be it overalls, starched shirt or monogrammed baseball cap – that didn’t quite fit or suit him, to bow and scrape before supercilious supervisors and malignant middle-managers so inflated by rank as to think that they need no longer trouble themselves with common courtesy and that the concept of right and wrong has no independent existence but is theirs to redefine on a whim, forgetting, in their conceit, that rank begins and ends at the factory gates, which, very often, is where Tony could be found, patiently waiting for their shift to end.
Right. So, wealth, you mean?
No, not wealth. Just money enough. He didn’t want to live in a country mansion with fifty-six cars and a yacht. He wasn’t looking to be able to do whatever he liked in life. But to be able not to have to do whatever he didn’t like would be nice. He would be lying if he said that this thought hadn’t crossed his mind. But he would be lying twice over if he pretended that that was the whole story.
He also wanted something more. He wanted acknowledgement. He wanted recognition. He wanted respect. If he wanted to realise the idea that he had of himself, how much more so did he want others to realise it too? He wanted people who in the past had looked down on him, to now look up to him. He wanted them to feel humble in his presence and embarrassed at having failed to notice sooner the true measure of the man who for all these years had stood meekly before them. He wanted them to tell their wives, or their children, or their friends, or their friends’ wives and children ‘I used to know him’, proudly, as though a little of his glory, through mere contact with him, had somehow rubbed off on them. Sure, he wanted justice to be done, but what he really wanted was for justice to be seen to be done.
Right. So, fame, you mean?
No, not fame. Respect! There’s a world of difference. The one is about being seen, the other, about how you’re seen, a seismic shift in emphasis often overlooked by today’s narcissistic youth. Fame comes at a price, they say, but the price has never been so low. You can buy it these days for pennies. Respect, however, will always have to be earned. The two are not mutually exclusive but they should never, under any circumstances, be confused.
Yet wasn’t that exactly the mistake Tony had made? With all the focus on how he wanted other people to see him, had he not lost sight of himself? Or, if not lost sight exactly, at least turned a blind eye. So desperately, it seemed, did he crave these things – not wealth and definitely not fame – that he was prepared to ignore his own life-long maxim: that respect, like charity, begins at home; that the only kind worth having is self-respect; and he had lost his the minute he’d said yes to an obviously ill-fated cover version, that he was only offered in the first place because of some highly sensationalised newspaper article. He just hadn’t been able to admit it until now.
His circumstances now, though, left him no more room for denial. The complete lack of interest here today was a real eye opener and had brought him to his senses at last, awakened him from his ‘unduly protracted dream’. Just how far he had fallen from grace became all too painfully apparent. Under the impression that he was at long last climbing the ladder of success, he had been all the while plumbing new depths and far from becoming a cut above, he had sunk beneath contempt. He had allowed his head to rule his heart but his head was turned, in the clouds, up his own arse. He had made secondary considerations (if they could even be accorded that status) his primary motivation for seeing this thing through, forgetting, in what appeared to him now as some fo
rm of temporary insanity, that music was, and always should be, an end in itself. At the first opportunity, it seemed, he had abandoned his principles wholesale and in trying to better himself had in actual fact become what he hated most. In a word:
‘I’m a fuckin sell-out, man!’
In day-to-day life, he reflected, in day-to-day jobs, the question of ‘selling out’ never really arises. You go about your business as a matter of course, or of necessity, indifferently, without any strength of feeling one way or the other. It is only when you feel strongly enough about something to form definite opinions on it, and then choose, for profit or personal gain, to conduct yourself counter to those opinions can you be accused of selling out. He himself, then, he concluded, had been more deserving of respect as a bin man or a barman than he was now, at this moment; or a store man, or a labourer, or a security guard, or a window cleaner; a line worker, order picker, shelf stacker, forklift driver, burger flipper or whatever. And that would have still been true even if this CD, notwithstanding its complete lack of originality, or even legitimacy, had gone on to become a multi-million selling success story and launched him – a not uncommon phenomenon – launched him on the road to international superstardom.
All right, then. But what about the here