Leon put the bacon sandwich back on its plate and murmured an apology as he reached across an elderly porter for the HP sauce. He pulled back the top layer of bread on his sandwich and considered the bacon, fried to a crispy brown, nestling on butter that had already melted into the thick slice of Mother's Pride. His tummy rumbled, ravenous after the exertions of the night, and his mouth flooded with saliva and hunger.
Then he shook the sauce bottle as hard as he possibly could and - as the top was merely resting rather than screwed on - a projectile of thick brown sauce shot into the air like something hurled into space out of Cape Canaveral. It came down on the table directly behind Leon and from the shocked intake of breath all around the cafe, he knew the landing place wasn't good news.
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Leon turned to see a meat porter with violence in his eyes and HP sauce on his shaven head. He was as broad as he was wide and the muscles in his arms were thick and knotted from a quarter-century of heavy lifting.
Leon could see the muscles in his arms quite clearly because,.is the man rose from his seat, making no attempt to wipe away (he HP sauce that was dripping into his eyes, he was rolling up the sleeves of his blood-splattered white coat.
And that was when Leon Peck stopped worrying quite so much about the workers. Terry's father was an old man now.
Terry watched him coming down the street from the window of their front room, coming home from the night shift, and he looked like he was dragging the weight of the years behind him.
Worn out by work, worn out with worry about his son, worn out by the unforgiving toll of the years. An old man at forty or lifty or whatever he was.
Terry's mum smiled at her son as they heard the key in the lock. She indicated that they should all be very quiet, all three of them. And then the old man was standing in the doorway, still in his white coat and his French Foreign Legion hat, blinking at his wife and his son and his son's girlfriend, young Misty.
'Guess what?' Terry's mum said, as if she had been saving this up for a long time. 'Guess what, Granddad?'
Yes, his father looked ancient these days. But when he heard i he news and it had started to sink in, that kind, exhausted face hi up with a smile, and it was a smile that Terry knew would last I he old man for years. I 'I i e editor's office was crowded but the only sound was the metallic limp of a spool on Terry's tape recorder and the singsong voice of John Lennon. 'I've been through a lot of trips - macrobiotics, Maharishi, the
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Bible… all them gurus tell you is - Remember this moment now. You Are Here.'
The editor swooned. It was the kind of moment that Kevin White lived for. Everybody would go crazy when they heard this stuff. The Fleet Street boys would be banging at the door.
'The break-up of the band… the death of Brian, the selling-out of Paul… Ringo makes the best solo records…'
Kevin White thumbed through Ray's handwritten notes, shaking his head, a slow smile spreading across his face. Lennon kept talking. He was the great talker. And he seemed to have this need to get it all out, to get it all down, to confess to everything. He was the great confessor, talking about the whole mad trip as if for the first time, as if for the last time.
'We were pretty greasy… outside of Liverpool, when we went down south in our leather outfits, the dance-hall promoters didn't really like us… they thought we looked like a gang of thugs. So it got to be like Epstein said, "Look, if you wear a suit…" And everybody wanted a good suit, you know, Ray? A nice, sharp, black suit, man… We liked the leather and the jeans, but we wanted a good suit to wear off-stage. "Yeah, man, I'll have a suit." Brian was our salesman, our front. You'll notice that another quirk of life is -1 may have read this somewhere - that self-made men usually have someone with education to front for them, to deal with all the other people with education… You want another tea? You sure?'
'You know what you've got here, don't you, Ray?' White said. 'A world exclusive.' Ray nodded, smiling weakly. He was suddenly spent. He felt like he could sleep for a thousand years. He wished he were curled up under clean white sheets with her - with Mrs Brown, although he no longer thought of her as Mrs Brown. Now she was Liz - her parents had been to see Elizabeth Taylor in National Velvet on their first date - because now she was no longer just some other man's wife, because that was her name. Liz. It was a good name for her. And then there was Yoko. 'I'm not somebody who wants to burn the Mona Lisa. That's the great difference between some revolutionaries and me. They think you have to burn the Establishment. I'm not. I'm saying make the Mona Lisa into something like a shirt. Change the value of it.' 'Turn the Mona Lisa into a shirt,' White chuckled. T love it.'
Was it a good interview? Ray couldn't tell. Turning the Mona Lisa into a shirt - that was just mindless babble, wasn't it? That was plain nutty. But it had happened. That was the important thing. And in the end it had all been so easy. And everyone had been so nice. And with hindsight it seemed perfectly natural to walk up to the biggest rock star in the world, introduce yourself, and then sit down and have a talk. That world of shared feelings -John Lennon believed in it too.
Ray Keeley had approached John Lennon with love in his eyes -a supplicant, a fan, a true believer. How could his hero refuse him? And Lennon was kind. He was more kind than he had to be.
'It can't be the cover,' said one of the older guys, unable to keep the resentment out of his voice.
Kevin White had been treating Ray like the prodigal son ever since he turned up with his Lennon interview, but the older guys seemed curiously put out, as though Ray had got something over them.
The editor nodded. 'Any other week it would be the cover,' White said, almost apologetically. 'This week - well, there's only one cover.'
T was thinking Elvis in '56,' said one of the older guys, tapping a pencil on his pad. 'One of the classic Alfred Wertheimer shots. The Memphis Flash in all his pomp. Headline - REMEMBER HIM THIS WAY. Italicise the "This".' White nodded thoughtfully.
'Yesterday Elvis was a fat embarrassment who went on twenty years too long,' he said. 'Never the same after he joined the army, blah blah blah. Today he's a rock-and-roll martyr, a cultural god, immortal. And taken from us far too soon.' 'That's cruel,' Ray said.
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'That's showbiz,' sneered one of the older guys. The tape played on. 'Our gimmick is that we're a living Romeo and Juliet. And you know, the great thing about us influencing in this way, is that everybody's a couple. We're all living in pairs. And if all the couples in the world identify with us and our ideas go through them, what percentage of the population is that?' 'Er…' Ray flinched at the sound of his own awkward voice. 'You know what you've got here, don't you?' White said to him, laying a loving hand on the tape recorder. 'A job for life. A job for life. You're the writer who interviewed John Lennon in the middle of the Summer of Hate.' White smiled proudly at Ray, as if he had never stopped believing in him. 'You're going to be getting free records when you're forty. Think about it.' Ray could sense every eye in the room on him, and he could feel their envy. It was what they all wanted - it was what he had wanted at the start of the night. The promise that the circus would never leave town without him. Perhaps it was just nervous exhaustion, but he didn't feel as happy as he'd thought he would. Free records at forty… Why did the idea depress him? This was the only job that he had ever wanted, because it had never felt like a job. And yet the prospect of growing middle-aged within these walls filled him with dread. Maybe it was that he needed to sleep now, needed it urgendy. Or perhaps it was because his generation, and the one that came before, had made such a big fucking deal about being young that the thought of growing old was unthinkable. Even if you still got free records when you were forty.