'I'll try my best,' Ray said. 'But I don't know if I'm a real journalist or just somebody who likes music'
Kevin White stood up. It was time for him to face the men in suits again. • 'You'd better find out,' the editor said. Leon was gone. Terry was sitting on his desk, his DMs dangling, flicking through the copy of last week's Paper that Misty had given him at the airport.
'This is what you need, Ray,' he said. 'New! The Gringo Waistcoat. Get into the Original Gringo Waistcoat - the new style. You'd look lovely in a Gringo Waistcoat.'
Ray dropped into his chair and stared into space. Terry didn't notice. It was an endless source of amusement to him that the classifieds in The Paper were always exactly one year behind the times. While the kid in the street was trying to look like Johnny Rotten, the models in the ads still looked like Jason King.
Cotton-drill loons - still only Ј2.80… Moccasin boots - choose from one long top fringe or three freaky layers.
According to the classifieds, the readers of The Paper were wearing exactly what they had been wearing for the last ten years -flared jeans, Afghan coats, cheesecloth galore, and, always and for ever, T-shirts with amusing slogans. Sometimes it felt like The Paper would not exist without T-shirts with amusing slogans.
I CHOKED LINDA LOVELACE. LIE DOWN I THINK I LOVE YOU. SEX APPEAL - GIVE GENEROUSLY. And that timeless classic, the fucking flying ducks - two cartoon ducks, coupling in
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mid-flight, the male duck looking hugely satisfied, the female duck looking alarmed.
Terry leaned back, smiling to himself, his spiky head resting against a picture he had torn from a library book and sellotaped to his wall - Olga Korbut, smiling sweetly, bent double on the mat. After the Montreal Olympics last year, a lot of people had switched their affections to the Romanian girl, Nadia Comaneci, but Terry was sticking with Olga.
They each had their own wall, facing their desk with its typewriter, a sleek Olivetti Valentine in red moulded plastic. On Terry's wall were bands and girls - record company 8x10 glossies of the New York Dolls, the Clash and the Sex Pistols plus images pillaged from magazines of Debbie Harry in a black mini-dress, Jane Fonda in Barbarella and Olga Korbut at the Munich Olympics.
Leon's wall was by far the most artistic - an undercoat of favourite bands had been almost obliterated by headlines cut from newspapers, with yet another layer of breaking news and advertising slogans pasted on top. So a record company glossy of the Buzzcocks had a headline about the death of Mao Tse-Tung running diagonally across it, while a yellowing picture from The Times of General Franco's coffin was enhanced with an ad for the new Only Ones single. And as Ray swung round in his chair and took out his tape recorder, he was watched by pictures of John Lennon.
There were also dog-eared images of Joni Mitchell and Dylan and Neil Young, but Ray's wall was really a shrine to Lennon. John gone solo, in white suit and round NHS specs, Yoko hanging on to his arm. John when he had just started growing his hair, that golden middle period of Revolver and Rubber Soul. John during Beatlemania, grinning in a suit with the rest of the boys. And the leather-jacket John of Hamburg, all James Dean cock and swagger, too vain to wear his glasses… This fucking, fucking tape recorder! The problem was that one of the spools was slightly off kilter. Ray had probably bent it pulling out the cassette after interviewing Phil Lynott with one too many screwdrivers and half a spliff in his system. Now the spool described an erratic circle when it should be standing up straight. You couldn't stick this thing in front of John Lennon.
Terry guffawed. 'Listen to this,' he said. 'Couple of girls trying to get up a petition to get Roxy Music back on the road - they say, Roxy Must Rule Again.'
Ray looked over his shoulder, smiling at his friend. The classifieds were a magic kingdom of musicians wanted, records wanted, girlfriends wanted, perfect worlds wanted, where ads for Greenpeace and Save the Whales were right next to ads for cotton-drill loon pants and Gringo Waistcoats.
But Ray saw that though there was derision in Terry's laughter, there was also something that he could only identify as love.
This was their paper. This was their thing. This was their place. And soon he would be asked to leave. He didn't know how he could stand it.
'Badge collectors read on', said Terry, and then he looked up at Ray. 'What the fuck's wrong with you?'
'Nothing.' When you grew up with brothers, you learned you always had to come straight back at them. 'What the fuck's wrong with you?'
Ray turned his back to Terry, busying himself at his desk, trying to straighten the bent spool on his tape recorder, and letting his hair fall forward so that his friend couldn't see the panic and pain in his eyes.
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FOUR
Leon's squat was in a large, decaying white house on a street of boarded-up buildings.
There was a kind of muddy moat around the perimeter of the house with wooden planks leading across it, like the ramshackle drawbridge of a rotting castle. On the ground floor the cracked and crumbling white plaster was almost obliterated by slogans.
WE ARE THE WRITING ON YOUR WALL. NO DRUGS IN HERE. CATS LIKE PLAIN CRISPS. Someone had changed a scrawled white NF into a bold black NAZIS OUT.
Leon slipped his hand into his leather jacket and felt for his key, glancing over his shoulder before he began negotiating his way across the planks. He had been in the squat for over a year now, ever since he had dropped out of the LSE and started full time on The Paper, but there was still a taste of fear in his mouth whenever he came back. You never knew when the bailiffs and cops would be coming. You never knew what was waiting for you.
As soon as he was inside the hallway a hairy unwashed face appeared at the top of the stairs, as Leon knew it would, as it always did. It wasn't just Leon. There was a creeping paranoia about squat life that never really went away. It seemed strangely familiar to Leon, because he thought it was not so different to the suspicion lurking behind the net curtains of the rich suburb where he had grown up.
'Someone's waiting for you,' said the hairy face at the top of the stairs. Leon was amazed. Nobody was ever waiting for him. 'Some straight,' said the hairy guy. 'Reckons he's your father.'
I knew it, Leon thought, his stomach sinking. I knew something bad was going to happen.
'The French guys don't like it,' said the face at the top of the stairs. We nearly didn't let him in.'
'You shouldn't have,' Leon said, trying to keep his voice calm, trying to pretend he was in control. He began climbing the stairs.
The squat was meant to be some kind of democracy, but in reality it was run by the French and Germans, who were older, who had been doing this for years, who talked about adventures in places like Paris and Amsterdam with such authority that Leon always fell silent, and felt like a kid who had seen nothing of the world. Leon was furious that his father should embarrass him in front of these great men.
At the top of the stairs he heard the usual babble of languages and sounds. The floorboards of the squat were bare and everything echoed and seemed louder than it should have. The Grateful Dead, turned up to ten, an argument about the murder of Leon Trotsky, another argument about a borrowed bottle of milk, and a woman's voice, apparently soothing a baby.
Leon wondered what his father would make of the overwhelming smell, for the squat was full of ripe scents, the trapped air behind the boarded-up windows reeking of dry rot, unwashed clothes, joss sticks and, seeping into everything, the odour of the vegetable soup that was permanently simmering on a big black stove.