“What d’you reckon?” She’s leaning against the door frame, arms folded, half smiling at whatever ridiculous face I’m making.
“It’s the best collection I’ve ever seen.” I have no idea what to offer her. This lot must be worth at least six or seven grand, and she knows it. Where am I going to get that kind of money from?
“Give me fifty quid and you can take every one away with you today.”
I look at her. We’re now officially in Joke Fantasy Land, where little old ladies pay good money to persuade you to cart off their Chippendale furniture. Except I am not dealing with a little old lady, and she knows perfectly well that what she has here is worth a lot more than fifty quid. What’s going on?
“Are these stolen?”
She laughs. “Wouldn’t really be worth my while, would it, lugging all this lot through someone’s window for fifty quid? No, they belong to my husband.”
“And you’re not getting on too well with him at the moment?”
“He’s in Spain with a twenty-three-year-old. A friend of my daughter’s. He had the fucking cheek to phone up and ask to borrow some money and I refused, so he asked me to sell his singles collection and send him a check for whatever I got, minus ten percent commission. Which reminds me. Can you make sure you give me a five pound note? I want to frame it and put it on the wall.”
“They must have taken him a long time to get together.”
“Years. This collection is as close as he has ever come to an achievement.”
“Does he work?”
“He calls himself a musician, but … ” She scowls her disbelief and contempt. “He just sponges off me and sits around on his fat arse staring at record labels.”
Imagine coming home and finding your Elvis singles and your James Brown singles and your Chuck Berry singles flogged off for nothing out of sheer spite. What would you do? What would you say?
“Look, can’t I pay you properly? You don’t have to tell him what you got. You could send the forty-five quid anyway, and blow the rest. Or give it to charity. Or something.”
“That wasn’t part of the deal. I want to be poisonous but fair.”
“I’m sorry, but it’s just … I don’t want any part of this.”
“Suit yourself. There are plenty of others who will.”
“Yeah, I know. That’s why I’m trying to find a compromise. What about fifteen hundred? They’re probably worth four times that.”
“Sixty.”
“Thirteen.”
“Seventy-five.”
“Eleven. That’s my lowest offer.”
“And I won’t take a penny more than ninety.” We’re both smiling now. It’s hard to imagine another set of circumstances that could result in this kind of negotiation.
“He could afford to come home then, you see, and that’s the last thing I want.”
“I’m sorry, but I think you’d better talk to someone else.” When I get back to the shop I’m going to burst into tears and cry like a baby for a month, but I can’t bring myself to do it to this guy.
“Fine.”
I stand up to go, and then get back on my knees: I just want one last, lingering look.
“Can I buy this Otis Redding single off you?”
“Sure. Ten pee.”
“Oh, come on. Let me give you a tenner for this, and you can give the rest away for all I care.”
“OK. Because you took the trouble to come up here. And because you’ve got principles. But that’s it. I’m not selling them to you one by one.”
So I go to Wood Green and I come back with a mint-condition ‘You Left the Water Running,’ which I pick up for a tenner. That’s not a bad morning’s work. Barry and Dick will be impressed. But if they ever find out about Elvis and James Brown and Jerry Lee Lewis and the Pistols and the Beatles and the rest, they will suffer immediate and possibly dangerous traumatic shock, and I will have to counsel them, and …
How come I ended up siding with the bad guy, the man who’s left his wife and taken himself off to Spain with some nymphette? Why can’t I bring myself to feel whatever it is his wife is feeling? Maybe I should go home and flog Laura’s sculpture to someone who wants to smash it to pieces and use it for scrap; maybe that would do me some good. But I know I won’t. All I can see is that guy’s face when he gets his pathetic check through the mail, and I can’t help but feel desperately, painfully sorry for him.
It would be nice to report that life is full of exotic incidents like this, but it isn’t. Dick tapes me the first Liquorice Comfits album, as promised; Jimmy and Jackie Corkhill stop arguing, temporarily; Laura’s mum doesn’t ring, but my mum does. She thinks Laura might be more interested in me if I did some evening classes. We agree to differ or, at any rate, I hang up on her. And Dick, Barry, and I go by minicab to the White Lion to see Marie, and our names are indeed on the guest list. The ride costs exactly fifteen quid, but that doesn’t include the tip, and bitter is two pounds a pint. The White Lion is smaller than the Harry Lauder, so it’s half full rather than two-thirds empty, and it’s much nicer, too, and there’s even a support act, some terrible local singer-songwriter for whom the world ended just after ‘Tea for the Tillerman’ by Cat Stevens, not with a bang but a wimp.
The good news: 1) I don’t cry during ‘Baby, I Love Your Way,’ although I do feel slightly sick. 2) We get a mention: “Is that Barry and Dick and Rob I see down there? Nice to see you, fellas.” And then she says to the audience, “Have you ever been to their shop? Championship Vinyl in north London? You really should.” And people turn round to look at us, and we look at each other sheepishly, and Barry is on the verge of giggling with excitement, the idiot. 3) I still want to be on an album cover somewhere, despite the fact that I was violently sick when I got to work this morning because I’d been up half the night smoking roll-ups made with dog-ends and drinking banana liqueur and missing Laura. (Is that good news? Maybe it’s bad news, definite, final proof that I’m mad, but it’s good news in that I still have an ambition of sorts, and that Melody Radio is not my only vision of the future.)
The bad news: 1) Marie brings someone out to sing with her for her encore. A bloke. Someone who shares her microphone with her with an intimacy I don’t like, and sings harmony on ‘Love Hurts,’ and looks at her while he’s doing so in a way that suggests that he’s ahead of me in the queue for the album shoot. Marie still looks like Susan Dey, and this guy, she introduces him as ‘T-Bone Taylor, the best-kept secret in Texas’, looks like a prettier version of Daryl Hall of Hall and Oates, if you can imagine such a creature. He’s got long blond hair, and cheekbones, and he’s well over nine feet tall, but he’s got muscles too (he’s wearing a denim waistcoat and no shirt) and a voice that makes that man who does the Guinness adverts sound soppy, a voice so deep that it seems to land with a thud on the stage and roll toward us like a cannonball.
I know my sexual confidence is not high at the moment, and I know that women are not necessarily interested in long blond hair, cheekbones, and height; that sometimes they are looking for shortish dark hair, no cheekbones and width, but even so! Look at them! Susan Dey and Daryl Hall! Entwining the naked melody lines from ‘Love Hurts’! Mingling their saliva, almost! Just as well I wore my favorite shirt when she came into the shop the other day, otherwise I wouldn’t have stood a chance.
There is no other bad news. That’s it.
When the gig finishes I pick my jacket up off the floor and start to go.
“It’s only half-ten,” Barry says. “Let’s get another one in.”
“You can if you want. I’m going back.” I don’t want to have a drink with someone called T-Bone, but I get the feeling that this is exactly what Barry would like to do. I get the feeling that having a drink with someone called T-Bone could be the high point of Barry’s decade. “I don’t want to muck your evening up. I just don’t feel like staying.”