“Not even for half an hour?”
“Not really.”
“Hold on a minute, then. I’ve got to take a piss.”
“Me too,” Dick says.
When they’re gone, I get out quickly, and hail a black cab. It’s brilliant, being depressed; you can behave as badly as you like.
Is it so wrong, wanting to be at home with your record collection? It’s not like collecting records is like collecting stamps, or beermats, or antique thimbles. There’s a whole world in here, a nicer, dirtier, more violent, more peaceful, more colorful, sleazier, more dangerous, more loving world than the world I live in; there is history, and geography, and poetry, and countless other things I should have studied at school, including music.
When I get home (twenty quid, Putney to Crouch End, and no tip) I make myself a cup of tea, plug in the headphones, and plow through every angry song about women by Bob Dylan and Elvis Costello I own, and when I’ve got through those, I stick on a Neil Young live album until I have a head ringing with feedback, and when I’ve finished with Neil Young I go to bed and stare at the ceiling, which is no longer the dreamy, neutral activity it once was. It was a joke, wasn’t it, all that Marie stuff? I was kidding myself that there was something I could go on to, an easy, seamless transition to be made. I can see that now. I can see everything once it’s already happened—I’m very good at the past. It’s the present I can’t understand.
I get to work late, and Dick has already taken a message from Liz. I’m to ring her at work, urgently. I have no intention of ringing her at work. She wants to cancel our drink this evening, and I know why, and I’m not going to let her. She’ll have to cancel to my face.
I get Dick to ring her back and tell her that he’d forgotten I wouldn’t be in all day—I’ve gone to a record fair in Colchester and I’m coming back specially for a date this evening. No, Dick doesn’t have a number. No, Dick doesn’t think I’ll be ringing the shop. I don’t answer the phone for the rest of the day, just in case she tries to catch me out.
We’ve arranged to meet in Camden, in a quiet Youngs pub on Parkway. I’m early, but I’ve got a Time Out with me, so I sit in a corner with my pint and some cashews and work out which films I’d see if I had anyone to go with.
The date with Liz doesn’t take long. I see her stomping toward my table—she’s nice, Liz, but she’s huge, and when she’s angry, like she is now, she’s pretty scary—and I try a smile, but I can see it’s not going to work, because she’s too far gone to be brought back like that.
“You’re a fucking arsehole, Rob,” she says, and then she turns around and walks out, and the people at the next table stare at me. I blush, stare at the Time Out and take a big pull on my pint in the hope that the glass will obscure my reddening face.
She’s right, of course. I am a fucking arsehole.
Seven
For a couple of years, at the end of the eighties, I was a DJ at a club in Kentish Town, and it was there I met Laura. It wasn’t much of a club, just a room above a pub, really, but for a six-month period it was popular with a certain London crowd—the almost fashionable, right-on, black 501s-and-DMs-crowd that used to move in herds from the market to the Town and Country to Dingwalls to the Electric Ballroom to the Camden Plaza. I was a good DJ, I think. At any rate, people seemed happy, they danced, stayed late, asked me where they could buy some of the records I played, and came back week after week. We called it the Groucho Club, because of Groucho Marx’s thing about not wanting to join any club that would have him as a member; later on we found out that there was another Groucho Club somewhere in the West End, but nobody seemed to get confused about which was which. (Top five floor-fillers at the Groucho, incidentally: ‘It’s a Good Feeling’ by Smokey Robinson and the Miracles; ‘No Blow No Show’ by Bobby Bland; ‘Mr. Big Stuff’ by Jean Knight; ‘The Love You Save’ by the Jackson Five; ‘The Ghetto’ by Donny Hathaway.)
And I loved, loved doing it. To look down on a roomful of heads all bobbing away to the music you have chosen is an uplifting thing, and for that six-month period when the club was popular, I was as happy as I have ever been. It was the only time I have ever really had a sense of momentum, although later I could see that it was a false momentum, because it didn’t belong to me at all, but to the music: anyone playing his favorite dance records very loud in a crowded place, to people who had paid to hear them, would have felt exactly the same thing. Dance music, after all, is supposed to have momentum—I just got confused.
Anyway, I met Laura right in the middle of that period, in the summer of ’87. She reckons she had been to the club three or four times before I noticed her, and that could well be right—she’s small, and skinny, and pretty, in a sort of Sheena Easton pre-Hollywood makeover way (although she looked tougher than Sheena Easton with her radical lawyer spiky hair and her boots and her scary pale blue eyes), but there were prettier women there, and when you’re looking on in that idle kind of way, it’s the prettiest ones you look at. So, on this third or fourth time, she came up to my little rostrum thing and spoke to me, and I liked her straightaway: she asked me to play a record that I really loved (‘Got to Get You off My Mind’ by Solomon Burke, if anyone cares), but which had cleared the floor whenever I’d tried it.
“Were you here when I played it before?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, you saw what happened. They were all about to go home.”
It’s a three-minute single, and I’d had to take it off after about a minute and a half. I played ‘Holiday’ by Madonna instead; I used modern stuff every now and again, at times of crisis, just like people who believe in homeopathy have to use conventional medicine sometimes, even though they disapprove of it.
“They won’t this time.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because I brought half of this lot here, and I’ll make sure they dance.”
So I played it, and sure enough Laura and her mates flooded the dance floor, but one by one they all drifted off again, shaking their heads and laughing. It is a hard song to dance to; it’s a mid-tempo R&B thing, and the intro sort of stops and starts. Laura stuck with it, and though I wanted to see whether she’d struggle gamely through to the end, I got nervous when people weren’t dancing, so I put ‘The Love You Save’ on quick.
She wouldn’t dance to the Jackson Five, and she marched over to me, but she was grinning and said she wouldn’t ask again. She just wanted to know where she could buy the record. I said if she came next week I’d have a tape for her, and she looked really pleased.
I spent hours putting that cassette together. To me, making a tape is like writing a letter—there’s a lot of erasing and rethinking and starting again, and I wanted it to be a good one, because … to be honest, because I hadn’t met anyone as promising as Laura since I’d started the DJ-ing, and meeting promising women was partly what the DJ-ing was supposed to be about. A good compilation tape, like breaking up, is hard to do. You’ve got to kick off with a corker, to hold the attention (I started with ‘Got to Get You off My Mind,’ but then realized that she might not get any further than track one, side one if I delivered what she wanted straightaway, so I buried it in the middle of side two), and then you’ve got to up it a notch, or cool it a notch, and you can’t have white music and black music together, unless the white music sounds like black music, and you can’t have two tracks by the same artist side by side, unless you’ve done the whole thing in pairs, and … oh, there are loads of rules.