“We’d better let Marie sell her tapes, Laura.”
“Marie, will you do a PA in Rob’s shop?”
Marie laughs. She laughs, and doesn’t reply. We stand there foolishly.
“You’re kidding me, right?”
“Not really. On a Saturday afternoon, when the shop’s busy. You could stand on the counter.” This last embellishment is Laura’s own, and I stare at her.
Marie shrugs. “OK. But I get to keep any money I make from the tapes.”
“Sure.” Laura again. I’m still staring at her from before, so I have to content myself with staring at her even harder.
“Thanks, it was nice to meet you.”
We go back to where we were standing.
“See?” she says. “Easy.”
Occasionally, during the first few weeks of Laura’s return, I try to work out what life is like now: whether it’s better or worse, how my feelings for Laura have changed, if they have, whether I’m happier than I was, how near I am to getting itchy feet again, whether Laura’s any different, what it’s like living with her. The answers are easy—better, kind of, yes, not very near, not really, quite nice—but also unsatisfying, because I know they’re not answers that come from down deep. But somehow, there’s less time to think since she came back. We’re too busy talking, or working, or having sex (there’s a lot of sex at the moment, much of it initiated by me as a way of banishing insecurity), or eating, or going to the pictures. Maybe I should stop doing these things, so as I can work it all out properly, because I know these are important times. But then again, maybe I shouldn’t; maybe this is how it’s done. Maybe this is how people manage to have relationships.
“Oh, great. You never asked us to play here, did you?”
Barry. Idiot. I might have known he’d find something in Marie’s imminent in-store performance to moan about.
“Didn’t I? I thought I did, and you said no.”
“How are we ever going to get going if even our friends won’t give us a break.”
“Rob let you put the poster up, Barry. Be fair.” This is quite assertive for Dick, but there is something in him that doesn’t like the idea of Barry’s band anyway. For him, I think, a band is too much like action, and not enough like fandom.
“Oh, fucking great. Big fucking deal. A poster.”
“How would a band fit in here? I’d have to buy the shop next door, and I’m not prepared to do that just so’s you can make a terrible racket one Saturday afternoon.”
“We could have done an acoustic set.”
“Oh, right. Kraftwerk unplugged. That’d be nice.”
This gets a laugh from Dick, and Barry looks round at him angrily.
“Shut up, jerk. I told you, we’re not doing the German stuff anymore.”
“What would be the point? What do you have to sell? Have you ever made a record? No? Well, there you are, then.”
So forceful is my logic that Barry has to content himself with stomping around for five minutes, and then sitting on the counter with his head buried in an old copy of Hot Press. Every now and again he says something feeble—“Just because you’ve shagged her,” for example, and, “How can you run a record shop when you have no interest in music at all?” But mostly he’s quiet, lost in contemplation of what might have been had I given Barrytown the opportunity to play live in Championship Vinyl.
It’s a stupid little thing, this gig. All it will be, after all, is half a dozen songs played on an acoustic guitar in front of half a dozen people. What depresses me is how much I’m looking forward to it, and how much I’ve enjoyed the pitiful amount of preparation (a few posters, a couple of phone calls to try and get hold of some tapes) it has involved. What if I’m about to become dissatisfied with my lot? What do I do then? The notion that the amount of … of life I have on my plate won’t be enough to fill me up alarms me. I thought we were supposed to ditch anything superfluous and get by on the rest, and that doesn’t appear to be the case at all.
The big day itself goes by in a blur, like it must have done for Bob Geldof at Live Aid. Marie turns up, and loads of people turn up to watch her (the shop’s packed, and though she doesn’t stand on the counter to play, she does have to stand behind it, on a couple of crates we found for her), and they clap, and at the end, some of them buy tapes and a few of them buy other stuff they see in the shop; my expenses came to about ten pounds, and I sell thirty or forty quid’s worth of stock, so I’m laughing. Chuckling. Smiling broadly, anyway.
Marie flogs the stuff for me. She plays about a dozen songs, only half of which are her own; before she starts, she spends some time rummaging through the browsing racks checking that I’ve got all the cover versions she was intending to play, and writing down the names and the prices of the albums they come from. If I haven’t got it, she crosses the song off her set list and chooses one I do have.
“This is a song by Emmylou Harris called ‘Boulder to Birmingham,’ ” she announces. “It’s on the album Pieces of the Sky, which Rob is selling this afternoon for the unbelievable price of five pounds and ninety-nine pence, and you can find it right over there in the ‘Country Artists—(Female)’ section.’ This is a song by Butch Hancock called … ” And at the end, when people want to buy the songs but have forgotten the names, Marie is there to help them out. She’s great, and when she sings, I wish that I weren’t living with Laura, and that my night with Marie had gone better than it did. Maybe next time, if there is a next time, I won’t feel so miserable about Laura going, and then things might be different with Marie, and … but I’m always going to feel miserable about Laura going. That’s what I’ve learned. So I should be happy that she’s staying, right? That’s how it should work, right? And that’s how it does work. Kind of. When I don’t think about it too hard.
It could be argued that my little event is, on its own terms, more successful than Live Aid, at least from the technical point of view. There are no glitches, no technical fuck-ups (although admittedly it would be hard to see what could go wrong, apart from a broken guitar string, or Marie falling over), and only one untoward incident: two songs in, a familiar voice emerges from the back of the shop, right next to the door.
“Will you play ‘All Kinds of Everything’?”
“I don’t know that,” says Marie sweetly. “But if I did, I’d sing it for you.”
“You don’t know it?”
“Nope.”
“You don’t know it?”
“Nope again.”
“Jesus, woman, it won the Eurovision Song Contest.”
“Then I guess I’m pretty ignorant, huh? I promise that the next time I play live here, I’ll have learned it.”
“I should fuckin’ hope so.”
And then I push through to the door, and Johnny and I do our little dance, and I shove him out. But it’s not like Paul McCartney’s microphone conking out during ‘Let It Be,’ is it?
“I had a terrific time,” says Marie afterwards. “I didn’t think it would work, but it did. And we all made money! That always makes me feel good.”
I don’t feel good, not now that it’s all over. For an afternoon I was working in a place that other people wanted to come to, and that made a difference to me—I felt, I felt, I felt, go on say it, more of a man, a feeling both shocking and comforting.
Men don’t work in quiet, deserted side streets in Holloway: they work in the City or the West End, or in factories, or down mines, or in stations or airports or offices. They work in places where other people work, and they have to fight to get there, and perhaps as a consequence they do not get the feeling that real life is going on elsewhere. I don’t even feel as if I’m the center of my own world, so how am I supposed to feel as though I’m the center of anyone else’s? When the last person has been ushered out of this place, and I lock the door behind him, I suddenly feel panicky. I know I’m going to have to do something about the shop—let it go, burn it down, whatever—and find myself a career.