Thirty
But look:
My five dream jobs:
1. NME journalist, 1976-1979
Get to meet the Clash, Sex Pistols, Chrissie Hynde, Danny Baker, etc. Get loads of free records—good ones, too. Go on to host my own quiz show or something.
2. Producer, Atlantic Records, 1964-1971 (approx.)
Get to meet Aretha, Wilson Pickett, Solomon Burke, etc. Get loads of free records (probably)—good ones, too. Make piles of money.
3. Any kind of musician (apart from classical or rap)
Speaks for itself. But I’d have settled just for being one of the Memphis Horns—I’m not asking to be Hendrix or Jagger or Otis Redding.
4. Film director.
Again, any kind, although preferably not German or silent.
5. Architect.
A surprise entry at number 5, I know, but I used to be quite good at technical drawing at school.
And that’s it. It’s not even as though this list is my top five, either: there isn’t a number six or seven that I had to omit because of the limitations of the exercise. To be honest, I’m not even that bothered about being an architect, I just thought that if I failed to come up with five, it would look a bit feeble.
It was Laura’s idea for me to make a list, and I couldn’t think of a sensible one, so I made a stupid one. I wasn’t going to show it to her, but something got to me—self-pity, envy, something—and I do anyway.
She doesn’t react.
“It’s got to be architecture, then, hasn’t it?”
“I guess.”
“Seven years’ training.”
I shrug.
“Are you prepared for that?”
“Not really.”
“No, I didn’t think so.”
“I’m not sure I really want to be an architect.”
“So you’ve got a list here of five things you’d do if qualifications and time and history and salary were no object, and one of them you’re not bothered about.”
“Well, I did put it at number five.”
“You’d really rather have been a journalist for the NME, than, say, a sixteenth-century explorer, or king of France?”
“God, yes.”
She shakes her head.
“What would you put down, then?”
“Hundreds of things. A playwright. A ballet dancer. A musician, yes, but also a painter or a university don or a novelist or a great chef.”
“A chef?”
“Yes. I’d love to have that sort of talent. Wouldn’t you?”
“Wouldn’t mind. I wouldn’t want to work evenings, though.” I wouldn’t, either.
“Then you might just as well stay at the shop.”
“How d’you work that out?”
“Wouldn’t you rather do that than be an architect?”
“I suppose.”
“Well, there you are then. It comes in at number five in your list of dream jobs, and as the other four are entirely impractical, you’re better off where you are.”
I don’t tell Dick and Barry that I’m thinking of packing it in. But I do ask them for their five dream jobs.
“Are you allowed to subdivide?” Barry asks.
“How d’you mean?”
“Like, does saxophonist and pianist count as two jobs?”
“I should think so.”
There’s silence in the shop; for a few moments it has become a primary school classroom during a quiet drawing period. Bics are sucked, crossings out are made, brows are furrowed, and I look over shoulders.
“And what about bass guitarist and lead guitarist?”
“I don’t know. Just the one, I should think.”
“What, so Keith Richards had the same job as Bill Wyman, according to you?”
“I didn’t say they’ve got … ”
“Someone should have told them that. One of them could have saved himself a lot of trouble.”
“What about, say, film reviewer and album reviewer?” says Dick.
“One job.”
“Brilliant. That frees me up for other things.”
“Oh yeah? Like?”
“Pianist and saxophonist, for a start. And I’ve still got two places left.”
And so on, and on. But the point is, my own list wasn’t freakish. It could have been made by anybody. Just about anybody. Anybody who works here, anyway. Nobody asks how to spell ‘solicitor.’ Nobody wants to know whether ‘vet’ and ‘doctor’ count as two choices. Both of them are lost, away, off in recording studios and dressing rooms and Holiday Inn bars.
Thirty-one
Laura and I go to see my mum and dad, and it feels sort of official, like we’re announcing something. I think that feeling comes from them rather than from us. My mum’s wearing a dress, and my dad doesn’t buzz around doing things to his stupid and vile homemade wine, and nor does he reach for the TV remote control; he sits down in a chair and listens and asks questions, and in a dim light he would resemble an ordinary human being having a conversation with guests.
It’s easier to have parents if you’ve got a girlfriend. I don’t know why this is true, but it is. My mum and dad like me more when I have someone, and they seem more comfortable; it’s as if Laura becomes a sort of human microphone, somebody we speak into to make ourselves heard.
“Have you been watching Inspector Morse?” Laura asks, apropos of nothing.
“No,” says my dad. “They’re repeats, aren’t they? We’ve got them on video from the first time around.” See, this is typical of my dad. It’s not enough for him to say that he never watches repeats, that he’s the first on the block; he has to add an unnecessary and mendacious embellishment.
“You didn’t have a video the first time around,” I point out, not unreasonably. My dad pretends he hasn’t heard.
“What did you say that for?” I ask him. He winks at Laura, as if she’s in on a particularly impenetrable family joke. She smiles back. Whose family is it, anyway?
“You can buy them in the shops,” he says. “Ready-made ones.”
“I know that. But you haven’t got any, have you?”
My dad pretends he hasn’t heard and, at this point, if it had been just the three of us, we would have had a row. I would have told him that he was mental and/or a liar; my mother would have told me not to make mountains out of molehills, etc., and I would have asked her whether she had to listen to this stuff all day, and we would have taken it on from there.
When Laura’s here, though … I wouldn’t go so far as to say she actively likes my parents, but she certainly thinks that parents generally are a good thing, and that therefore their little quirks and idiocies are there to be loved, not exposed. She treats my father’s fibs and boasts and non sequiturs as waves, giant breakers, and she surfs over them with skill and pleasure.
“They’re really expensive, though, aren’t they, those ready-made ones?” she says. “I bought Rob a couple of things on video for his birthday a few years ago, and they came to nearly twenty-five pounds!”
This is shameless stuff. She doesn’t think twenty-five pounds is a lot of money, but she knows they will, and my mum duly gives a loud, terrified, twenty-five-quid shriek. And then we’re off onto the prices of things—chocolates, houses, anything we can think of, really—and my dad’s outrageous lies are forgotten.
And while we’re washing up, more or less the same thing happens with my mum.
“I’m glad you’re back to sort him out,” she says. “God knows what the flat would look like if he had to look after himself.”
This really fucks me off, a) because I’d told her not to mention Laura’s recent absence, b) because you don’t tell any woman, but especially not Laura, that one of her major talents is looking after me, and c) I’m the tidier one of the two of us, and the flat was actually cleaner during her absence.
“I didn’t know you’d been letting yourself in to examine the state of our kitchen, Mum.”
“I don’t need to, thanks all the same. I know what you’re like.”