‘Charge!’ Now Tony is running down the steps into a bar that nestles under a theatre in Charing Cross Road.
They are away from the genteel restaurant, out on the town again. For their next drink, these clowns might even choose whisky and Coke because the Mods did, but will probably pass on Mateus Rose (even if The Faces really liked it).
Having me a real good time, thinks Pete.
What with the swirl of it, the joy of letting go which also feels like (but all the time you know it’s not) being more... no, not in control, more in charge.
‘Charge!’ Tony is running into a curtain of red velvet. At the last moment, he stops and pulls it aside. Behind the curtain, the bar is eerily quiet.
Too late to keep the peace, Tony only gets louder.
Strides across to the copper-topped bar. ‘Two pints of your finest ale, landlord’, he bellows in best mock-thesp. By now he’s brandishing a ten pound note. ‘You may keep the change,’ he solemnly declares.
The bar steward is wearing a short white jacket and strawberry blond hair straight out of a bottle (this is a theatre bar, sweetie). He pours two pints of Fuller’s London Pride and puts them on the bar, goes to the till with Tony’s tenner and comes back with two pound coins on a small silver plate. He says nothing.
Be like that, then. And I’ll have my change, if you don’t mind.
Tony scoops up the quids and they head off to a table. When Tony sits down, he leans absurdly far back. Hands behind his head, legs akimbo. The deckchair pose.
Chalk to cheese, Pete sits bolt upright, and when he starts to talk, his voice sounds guttural, almost menacing. As he means it to be.
‘Embedded’, says Pete. ‘You used the word,
“embedded”. You spoke of “embedded” and my good self in the same breath. Do you think my life is some kind of joke, or what?’
Is this a comedy, or what?
There had been a short taxi ride, from Tony’s club (near Green Park) to the Charing Cross Road. Paid for by Pete (Tony already coughed for the dinner, remember?). In the back of the cab, there was talk of Pete’s job at the university. Or rather, Tony was talking about it. Didn’t stop till they arrived at their destination, right here.
‘You have the satisfaction’, Tony pontificated, ‘of seeing something grow that will outlive even you.
Because it is embedded in the surrounding area – the poorest area of London that is served like no other by your university and its sense of obligation to local people.’
Only Tony. Only Tony after a few drinks could forget it’s me he’s trying to load this stuff onto.
‘The word “embedded”,’ Pete reminds him. ‘You used it spontaneously, of your own free will, in a conversation with me, about me. Don’t ever use that fucking management jargon shit with me, Skance.’
Pete is growling. So far, so good. But to play the role to maximum advantage, he should remain visibly, physically intense: leaning in towards Tony, eyes fixed on him, fixing him. Instead Pete finds himself leaning back, the better to explain himself. Ever the teacher, even in anger – yes, Dear Reader, there’s more here than mere performance, Pete feels the need to expand, to provide an account.
‘That management jargon shit – my job is crawling with it. Every sodding little thing I try to do, it infects. It chokes the courses I write, squeezes every ounce of integrity out of them. And I don’t write them, I don’t teach them so they can be re-written according to the sacred text of holy management shite.
‘And now I come out on a night with you’ (he’s no Geordie, our Pete, so where do these cadences come from?), and I find the same stuff spewing out of your droopy, fat arse-mouth.’
Pete puts the beer glass to his lips. He keeps the glass to his lips. The beer moves out of the glass.
By the slight movements in his neck you can see it is swilling down Pete’s throat. He keeps the glass to his lips until there is no more beer in it.
He’s downed the pint; the pint is downed. He takes the empty glass from his lips. He makes out he’s going to bang it down on the table; then, when it’s less than half a centimetre away, he stops; and puts it down very slowly, delicately. You would be inclined to think that it was not a beer glass at all, but a rare piece of Suzie Cooper china.
Meanwhile Pete is staring way past Tony, as if he’s too angry to look at him. Until – click – he looks him in the eye and says:
‘I’ll go to the bar, then’.
What a scene! What a player!
But Pete doesn’t actually move. Now he remembers he hasn’t got to the end! His speechifying resumes where he left off:
‘In case it isn’t clear, Skance, I don’t want to hear it from you ever again. And if I hear it again, from you, it’ll be the last thing I hear from you because I’ll be out of here, you’ll be out of my life. Out.’
Staccato. Machine-Gun. Wilko Johnson on guitar (if you don’t know, Google): ‘Do. You. Understand?’
Hardly a question. Pete nearly said ‘capice’ but that would have been too much. He’d be obliged to laugh even before Tony did.
Dear Pete, how did you get to be such a ham? But acting up was always their way of playing down. Insurance against not being up to the task; defence against the fear of being Malvolio instead of Mercutio. In their book, the one they wrote for each other, to be angry you had to perform it properly, with just the right quantity of knowingness and exactly the right amount of really meaning it. Capice?
For you must understand, Dear Reader, that underneath the goofing, spoofing, playing around, there was real malevolence in Pete’s words. Not just fear of Malvolience. That ‘management jargon shit’
and all that goes with it, really is the bane of his life; and he was close to walking out, never to be seen (by Tony) again.
He might just possibly have leant right over and smacked Tony in the face. Bang. Blood. Broken nose.
(10) A long time back
For there once was a group of townies in a crowded Art School pub. Full of themselves. It was Pete who glassed one of them. Somewhere in nowhere town, the scrawny little bastard – I bet he’s fat by now –
will still have the scar.
The Heaters were on tour, gigging that night at the art college of a provincial city. Finished the sound check and into the pub across the road. Heaving.
In the back room there were four blokes wearing designer shirts, perms and ’taches (that long ago), holding cigs between thumb and forefinger in a show of prole culture. They teased the art school boys (too many earrings and nose rings, just asking to be ripped out in a fight), and leered at the melancholy girls, pressing against them in the crush.
One of the townies grabbed Tony’s porkpie hat, and they all tried it on, posing with it and snickering and pretending to gob in it before tossing it back.
Four against two; no scope for fisticuffs. Our protagonists carried on drinking for a few minutes, then Pete told Tony to stand by the door. He picked up an empty bottle of light ale (long time ago, right?), and held it by the neck, half-hidden up his sleeve.
It felt heavy; his whole arm felt heavy. He felt too heavy to move. For a moment (how long?), Pete could see himself not moving.
Not now, not ever. If not now, then never.
Never doing it, never moving at all.
Pete raised his arm and brought it down very fast so that the bottle smashed against the side of the table. There was a crashing sound, but no time to hear it. The back of his hand was sprayed with the tiniest glass fragments, so delicate, but there was no time to feel it.
Now the neck of the bottle was a thick, stubby thing, a cock in his hand with a swollen, jagged knob at the end of it. He used it to fuck a young man’s face. Which one, any one of the four townies.
‘Prick,’ he said, as he pushed it in and turned it, splitting the man’s cheek – he felt flesh giving way, then pulled it out, and ran out of the pub still holding the broken bottle.
Pete and Tony weren’t there to see the blood running slowly at first, then turning to a torrent. Or the back room up-ending into a wholesale brawl (even the boys-with-earrings had a go). By the time the police arrived at the pub, Pete and Tony were safely stowed away in their dressing room, waiting to go on stage, been here since the sound check, OK? Except Pete was still breathing fast and loud.
‘Christ, Pete’, said Tony. ‘I wasn’t expecting you to do that.’
‘The point’, replied Pete, finally regaining control.
Just in time: they were due on stage five minutes later.
(11) All together on stage
Pete stock still, playing two saxophones at once.
Tony hanging on the microphone stand, dancing with it, dancing with himself, beaming, leering up at the crowd and schooling them like Fagin, or Richard III, or the snake in Jungle Book.
Come to me, little darlings. Come to me, believe in me. Show me who you are and there will be plenty to share. I will give you shares in togetherness. I will help you share each other.
Suddenly (oh, but we all knew it was coming), there is no sound, no movement. In a flash the stage goes dark. The whole band could have fallen into a crevasse, never to be seen again.
Yet there is a single spotlight, picking out Tony, his arms outstretched and head bowed like Christ on the Cross; until even this light is extinguished.
You don’t need me, you don’t need to see me, for tonight you have each other.
But the congregation is restless. They whistle and cry out. They love him and they insist that they love him. They want him, they want to be with him so they can love each other.
From the down beat when the last light goes off, thirty-one more beats of nothing, eight bars of silence. Then the band blasts back in, Tony’s voice soaring even above screechy Pete and his saxophones, and the stage lights have come crashing back on, so bright and loud it hurts to look and listen.
The band had rehearsed this over and over again, then over and over again with the lighting crew. No safety net; no drummer hitting sticks for the last four beats before re-entry. It’s stand or fall, do it or not at all.
Most nights it works wonderfully. On stage and off, the whole hall comes together round one man rising to new heights. In the dark, Tony has climbed onto a trapeze and now he is strung up high enough for everyone to adore him. They would kiss him if they could get close enough, and wipe his face tenderly.
They all want to be his Veronica.
(12) Back to the future
‘Finally’. There’s a word; an unexpectedly attractive word. I hope you can understand why such an ordinary adverb sounds so alluring to our friend Dr Pete Fercoughsey (former rock musician and radical journalist, now a senior lecturer in Journalism Studies and Creative Writing)? In Pete’s job, he never gets to say never. Neither does anyone else, really; perhaps not even the university’s vice-chancellor. Nothing is ever finalised. Nothing is absolutely the last in the series; and nothing lasts, either. Soon ‘last’ might not even be a word.
Which only makes ‘finally’ sound doubly attractive.
The unexpectedly difficult task of making clear shapes, identifying a beginning, middle and end, these are troubling Tony, too; although his local difficulties are of greater significance, since he has the privilege (right now it seems more like a burden) of being the director of the Cultural Olympiad.
And now that Pete, for all his aggressive posturing, has started confessing his troubles, Tony is sure to follow.
‘I can’t get my project to work properly, either,’
declares Tony.
‘So what is it that’s not working, Tony, my love?’
‘The whole show. It’s not working because it’s not a whole show. There’s a bunch of people on the inside who’ve all got moves to make and their own trades to do. But they don’t add up: the pieces don’t come together. And most of the insiders don’t like me anyway, because I’m always going too far. Even if I knew where to take them to, they wouldn’t follow me.
Meanwhile the people on the outside don’t seem to want to come in on it.
‘Maybe they just can’t see what there is to come in on. Can’t blame them, either, because neither can I. But carry on like this, and the Olympics will be London’s non-event. “Non-event”,’ he gestures, ‘is how the Games will be seen.’
Tony, please don’t do that scare quotes thing, Pete’s thinking. Don’t thing me, Tony would say to Pete, if Pete said aloud what Tony already knows he is thinking.
‘And that makes it hugely significant,’ Tony continues. ‘Not just a non-event that nobody notices.
The Olympiad looks set to be our Hurricane Katrina.
If the Games don’t make an impact, like New Orleans, the London brand will be broken into smithereens .’
By now Tony’s almost enjoying himself. For weeks he has been unable to put his finger on the problem. At least now he can talk to Pete about it.
‘Oh, the people out there’ – he’s gesturing again: maybe waving to them; perhaps shooing them away.
‘They want it to go OK, they’re not willing it to fail. If it does, they’d be implicated, too. But they sure ain’t willing to believe...’
‘Come of it, T,’ Pete interjects. ‘You want them to believe. Ha, ha, ha.’
‘Mock me,’ retorts Tony. ‘I don’t care. It will only make me stronger.’ He twists in his seat. Now Tony’s face is looming in at Pete.
‘Look, I now it sounds dodgy, and in the wrong hands it could get really spooky. But I only want this city, this country, to have that shared experience, the kind we used to make when we were on stage. The togetherness we could produce for all those people, for them, with them. Not just for our benefit, everyone in it together at least until the house lights came up.
‘So what if it was make-believe? If you could make what we made, and amplify it many times over, and make it last a while longer, you could make a city out of that. A city that feels like a city, not just a ragbag of people with nothing in common. And that would be a decent legacy, wouldn’t it? And maybe the house lights wouldn’t have to come up for a long time.’
Has Tony said too much, gone in deeper than he should, assumed, groundlessly, that Pete is the same old Pete? He’s not sure. In any case he rows back to shore as fast as he can:
‘You getting those beers in, then...?’
While Pete goes to get them, Tony can’t think of anything except how much he wants a cigarette.
‘It’ll be all right on the night, T,’ says Pete, back from the bar and the strawberry blond bloke standing behind it. ‘We could never tell from the sound check how it would turn out.’ But when he hears himself saying this just because Tony wants him to say something like this, Pete pulls himself up, kicks himself for falling into old habits so readily.
For your next line, Pete, find something that Tony isn’t expecting. Instead of cushioning him, holding him up, try rolling with it, let it go further than Tony would have wanted it to go. See how he likes it.
He tries it straightaway. ‘Still, maybe you’re right, T.’ Pete pauses, takes a mouthful of beer, and sucks it into his cheeks before swallowing it. Ten years earlier he would have drawn heavily on a fag and steadily, deliberately exhaled the smoke.
Even now, when he looks back at that fateful night, just a few weeks before Games Time, Pete doesn’t know whether at this point he already knew what he was going to say next. And does it matter, either way?
Regardless of how much he knew, his first sentence contained yet another, highly theatrical pause:
‘Perhaps the last time London felt... united’ –
employing, momentarily, the high falutin’ tone of wartime newsreel narration – ’was in July 2005 when some fools blew it up. That gave us something to share in.’
Tony chimes in: ‘And we’d been awarded the Olympics just the day before. A
winning combination.’
Pete has to top him. ‘Two shared experiences in significantly quick succession’, he adds. ‘The winning bid, terrorism, maybe they’re just meant to go together like love and marriage.’
‘Athletes, crowds,’ says Tony, ‘horse and carriage.’
‘Stadium, bombs,’ Pete adds.
‘The quick and the dead,’ they chorus.
‘Seriously, Tony,’ Pete continues: he won’t be bested on this. ‘The Olympic Games and terrorism, hitch them back together and you’ve got it made.
Just one explosion, and it could be your biggest hit. Aarf, aarf. ’
There, it’s been said. Not that either of them had meant to go this far, had they?
It started with Pete not wanting to behave the way he was supposed to; or maybe it started with Tony always setting up Pete to do what he wanted him to. In any case, Pete took the weight of Tony’s anxiety and swung it forward into full blown cynicism.
They have got to the point of saying, really, that London only comes together when it’s under attack, when there’s blood on the streets and bodies in bags. And when they came somewhere near to saying this, instead of stopping and leaving off, they carried on. In their silly dialogue, carrying on from how they always used to talk to each other, bloodshed first left unspecified, the blood flowing indiscriminately between the 1940s Blitz and the London bombings of July 2005, is now firmly attached to 2012. They have even begun to sketch out a new scenario: a bomb attached to the Games, a big bang during Games Time, which would produce the shared experience that Tony has been dreaming of.
Without thinking, without having to think because the calculation is staring them in the face, Tony and Pete are adding terror to 2012 and hitting the jackpot; possibly the biggest pay-out ever.
Imagine: millions of media moments, shared across the city, across the world, proliferating like fragments in a bomb blast. But instead of blowing London apart, the fragments are putting London back together again, making Londone.
London United. For all the world to see.
It’s a blockbuster waiting to be made, a truly global spectacle. A solution to the Olympics happening that isn’t happening. The there that isn’t there. Except that this isn’t going to happen either. It’s just a bad, stupidly bad joke between friends, isn’t it, just?
Pete’s mock laughter dies a death in his own mouth.
There is a moment of awkwardness between these two, who have experienced just about every kind of intimacy with each other except sex (with each other). Then Tony cocks his head slightly and squints over at Pete.
It’s his signature gesture from the old days: looking askance, making it seem like you’re staring the other guy down, but really it’s the cue for more.
Pete hardly needs prompting. Even after a long lay-off he’s ready for the familiar game.
‘That’d top Jill Dando’ – his opening stake.
‘I think you’ll find she’s been topped already.’
Tony’s first response is low key. But then he plays a higher card: ‘It’ll be more Diana than Diana.’
Ace. Now Pete must raise the game still higher.
‘The nation will be united in mourning sickness.
There will be unprecedented pomposity, pretentiousness, and primadonnas of public grief.
Never on the field of battle...’
‘A field day for Charlie Brooker,’ Tony interrupts.
‘Predictable, boring bastard’, Pete jibes, and the two of them laugh like monkeys.
Teasing out their sickening idea, they play on into the night. Laughing, snickering at scenarios that aren’t really laughable. Of course the rituals they are sneering at – bow the knee at Dunblane, don’t speak ill of St Dando, observe the laws of the cult of Diana (‘Why all the Ds?’, quips Pete) – really are idiotic. But breaking them this way, playing out bastardised scenes of blood, pain and mock-canonisation as if this were only iconoclasm, that’s almost as stupid. And they know it.
Once when they were Smart Alec teenagers, they thought this kind of thing was...smart. Feeling something like shame afterwards, came as something of a surprise to them. But now they know it’s making them feel dirty. Not horny dirty, just soap and water dirty. Like watching Big Brother (in recent years), or the wrestling on Saturday afternoons (many years ago), when you knew all the time you should have been doing something better.
Like old times, they tell themselves; but were they ever as tasteless as this? Then again, better not be too judgemental: this is only a couple of middle-aged guys, replaying old routines to cover the hole where their lives went. We must allow them something to cover up with, no matter what we think of it.
Over and over again, they smirk and grin; and so with this performance, acted out for each other’s benefit, they make it through the night.
(13) Indecision time