‘Because she’s in trouble, Jack.’ He hesitated, then sighed. ‘Something to do with drugs. And Andy. She wouldn’t be any more specific than that.’ He looked around the assembled faces, then said fiercely, ‘I’m not going without her.’
‘And if we don’t want to take her?’ Luke said.
‘Then you’ll go your way and I’ll go mine.’
Which really wasn’t an option, since Maurie was our singer and frontman, and there was no way we would find work in London without him.
Jeff said, ‘How much money?’
Maurie frowned at him. ‘What?’
‘How much money can she get?’
Maurie shrugged. ‘Don’t know. More than enough to get us to London. That’s all she said. I couldn’t talk her into going back to Glasgow.’
‘Okay,’ I said, ‘we might as well be democratic about it and put it to a vote.’ I raised my right hand. ‘I say we take her.’
I looked at the others, and one by one they raised reluctant hands, all except for Jeff. Maurie glared at him, but there was more hurt than anger in his eyes.
Until, finally, Jeff said, ‘Oh, alright.’
And it was settled. But none of us was happy with this completely unforeseen turn of events.
II
It was dark and raining heavily when we drove down Eastgate towards the roundabout at the foot of the hill, shortly after ten o’clock.
‘Jees,’ Jeff said, his voice hushed as he peered past the wipers and the rain towards the dominating seven-storey sweep of concrete that characterized the front end of Quarry Hill. It curved round St Peter’s Street, beyond the roundabout, and filled the view at the end of the road. We all crowded towards the front of the van to get a view of it. I had never seen anything on that scale in my life. It bore no relation, architecturally, to anything else around it. It was as if some giant spaceship had simply landed on the hill, vast and incongruous, and couldn’t take off again.
‘It looks like a prison,’ Dave said.
And I thought yes, that was it. It was exactly as you might have imagined some grim Soviet prison block where political prisoners were sent in their thousands for daring to think. All it lacked was the razor wire and the sweeping criss-cross of security searchlights.
‘That must be Oastler House,’ Maurie said. ‘Rachel said the whole complex is made up of about a dozen different blocks or “houses”, as they call them. She said to enter through the arch at Oastler, and they’re in Moynihan, which is the big block that runs the length of the north side.’
Jeff swung left into Vicar Lane, and we entered a maze of narrow backstreets lined by three- and four-storey red-brick factories and warehouses. He found parking in Edward Street, and cut the engine and lights. We all sat listening to the tick, tick of the cooling engine, reluctant to go out into the rain that we could hear battering on the roof.
Finally, a little before ten thirty, the rain eased a bit and we slipped out into the dark. The city was pretty much deserted. We could hear the rumble of light traffic on the main thoroughfares of Eastgate and St Peter’s Street, and New York Road beyond, but there wasn’t a soul in sight as we turned left into Lady Lane and hurried in the darkness down the hill towards Oastler. The Kingston Unity Friendly Society building loomed over us on our right, and on the left stood Circle House and the darkened window of Harold’s hairdressers.
We ran across the roundabout in a huddle and on to the concourse that led to the huge archway in the centre of the towering arc that was Oastler House. Lights burned beyond balconies in random patterns across all seven floors, and our footsteps echoed back at us in the dark from the curved walls of the arch as we passed through it. We emerged on the far side into another world. A world unto itself, enclosed and private, the city behind us shut out and lost beyond the dominating blocks of flats that ringed its perimeter. Even in the dark you could see the neglect and decay. Stained concrete, cracked and crazed. Street lamps whose bulbs had died, leaving pools of darkness around them. Weeds poking up through fissures in the tarmac. Football fields and kiddies’ play areas sad in their tawdry, shadowed emptiness.
Away to our right I saw an old red-brick building that had somehow been subsumed into the development, and the raised circle of an enormous gas storage tank.
‘This way.’ Maurie led us off to the left, blocks of flats rising up all around us.
We followed the curve of Oastler to Neilson, and another arch that offered a tempting escape back into the outside world. But we still had business within. There were vehicles parked along the front of the buildings, and further blocks were separated by cluttered open areas abandoned to the creeping advance of nature in the process of reclaiming them.
There was no one around. No movement, no sign of life, except for lit windows punctuating black spaces. I know now, of course, that good, working people lived ordinary lives in these blocks. Were born, and lived and died here. Played, fought, laughed, made love, as well as the best of a deteriorating environment. But to us, in the dark and the rain that night in 1965, it seemed alien and hostile.
Maurie found the entrance to Rachel’s stairway near the far end of Moynihan and we escaped the rain into a scarred and gloomy stairwell that smelled of urine. The lift was only big enough to take two, and so we decided to climb the stairs to the third floor. The smell of urine gave way to the perfume of stale cooking, cabbage and onion, and drains — a low, unpleasant note that seemed to permeate the entire building.
We passed along a dimly lit corridor to Rachel’s door near the far end. Her flat was on the interior side of the development. Some idiot with a can of spray paint had left his signature along most of the length of the wall.
Maurie knocked on the door, and after a brief wait we heard a girl’s voice come from the other side of it.
‘Who is it?’
‘It’s Maurie.’
The door opened, and she almost flew into his arms. He was as much taken aback as we were. She buried her face in his chest, her arms reaching around his substantial girth to squeeze the breath out of him.
‘Oh, Mo, I’m so glad you’re here.’
Her voice was muffled, almost lost in the damp of his jacket, and it wasn’t until she stepped back that I really saw her face for the first time.
There are many ways to describe a moment like that. Most of them mired in cliché. I could say that time stood still. Or that my heart pushed up into my throat and very nearly choked me. And in their own way these things would be true. I had butterflies in my stomach, and my mouth was so dry I could barely separate my tongue from the roof of my mouth. So I could be forgiven a little hyperbole.
When I first met Jenny Macfarlane, there had been an instant and powerful attraction. I had wanted her to be my girl. But at the risk of sounding like Jeff and his Veronica, this was different. I knew, beyond any shadow of doubt, that this girl would mean more to me than any other in my life. I knew it then, and I know it still today, fifty years on. But in the words of the song from a 1969 Rolling Stones album, Let it Bleed, you can’t always get what you want.
Of course, I didn’t know that then.
Her face was thin, and very pale, as if she hadn’t eaten much, or had suffered a recent illness. But her eyes were huge. The deepest, warmest brown, a mirror of the chestnut hair that fell in unruly ropes over her shoulders. She just made you want to protect her. From all the darknesses of the world. She wore a long-sleeved, close-fitting white smock over bell-bottomed jeans and brown boots. She was a skinny girl, but not skeletal. She carried flesh on her bones in the right places, and there was something almost classy about her. Elegant. She wore not a trace of make-up, and didn’t need to. Her lips were dark and quite full, in contrast to her long, thin nose, and her jawline was so well defined it was almost elfin.