'Ray! Robbie! Your tea's ready,' his mother called up from the foot of the stairs. Ray sighed with appreciation as he closed the sleeve.
His father was sitting in his favourite armchair like some suburban sultan while his mum carried plates of bread and jam into the front room. Ray's parents were an unlikely match - his mother a small nervous woman, jumping at shadows, his father as broad as he was tall, a bull of a man in carpet slippers, and these days always on the edge of anger.
Above the new fireplace - the real fire had just been ripped out and replaced with a gas job that had fake coals and unlikely-looking flames - there were photographs in silver frames.
Ray's parents on their wedding day. Ray and his two brothers John and Robbie on a sightseeing junk in Hong Kong harbour, three little kids - Robbie small, Ray medium and John large -smiling and squinting in the blazing sub-tropical sunshine. Their father grinning proudly in the light khaki of the Hong Kong Police Force, looking like an overgrown boy scout in his shorts and woolly socks, his bony knees colonial white.
Somewhere in the middle Sixties the photographs turned from black and white to colour. And among the colour photos there was John, eighteen years old now, in the darker uniform of the British Army, taken just before he was killed when an IRA bomb went off on a country road in South Armagh. It was the most recent photograph. Nothing had been right since then.
On the television, young women in swimming suits and high heels were staring ahead with fixed smiles as Matt Monro moved among them singing 'Thank Heaven for Little Girls'. Ray and his mum sat on the sofa and Robbie sprawled between hem on the floor. Everybody drank diluted orange cordial apart from his father, who had a cloudy glass of home-made beer by his feet.
'Now how can you compare some tart from Bongo Bongo Land with some tart from England?' he asked. 'It's not fair on them, is it? The darkies. Completely different standards of beauty.'
Ray rolled his eyes. The same old stuff, on and on, never ending. They said that travel broadened the mind. They had obviously never met his father.
'I might marry a black woman,' Ray said through a mouthful of Mother's Pride and Robertson's strawberry jam, the- one with the smiling Golliwog cavorting on the jar. 'Your grandchildren might be half black. Did that ever occur to you, Dad?'
A cloud seemed to pass across his father's face. 'What about the kids? The little half-castes? Did you ever think about them? Not belonging to any group. How do you think that feels?'
'If we all got mixed up together then there wouldn't be any more racism,' Ray said. 'Because then we would all be the same. Got any more blackcurrant, Mum?'
It was one of the things he argued about with his father. Along with the volume and value of his music, the length of his hair and John Lennon. It felt like they argued about everything these days. Ray wished he knew a black woman just so he could marry her and show his father that all men were brothers.
'Birds of a feather,' Ray's father said, pointing his knife at Ray. 'You don't see robins flying about with crows, do you?' 'Are you a crow, Dad? Are you a robin?'
'She's nice,' his mum said. 'Miss Korea. What one do you like, Robbie?'
'I don't like any of them!' Robbie said, blushing furiously. Ray laughed. He knew that his brother liked all of them. He wasn't fussy. He had heard Robbie fiddling about in his stripy pyjamas when he thought that Ray was sleeping. 'Enoch's right,' his father said. 'Send them all back.'
32
33
'What if they come from here?' Ray said, pushing the last of his bread and jam into his mouth. 'Where you going to send them back to, Dad?'
With his father still ranting about birds of a feather and beasts in the wild, Ray got up and carried his plate out to the kitchen and went upstairs to his bedroom. He knew what he needed, and put on the Who as loud as he dared - '5.15', sad and angry all at once, to match the way he felt. Why should I care? Why should I care?
As he made sure that he had enough tube fare to get him back to the city, Ray remembered something he had heard at The Paper. Skip Jones had told him that taking heroin was like stepping into a golden bubble - your troubles melted away when you were in there. That was how Ray felt about his music. It made the world go away.
But from downstairs came the rank stench of home-made beer -bitter hops, liquid malt extract and priming syrup, the whole sorry mess fermenting in the huge metal vats for weeks at a time - and it almost made him gag. That was the problem with living at home with his parents. Ray's floor would always be his father's ceiling. Leon stood at the hermetically sealed windows of The Paper, watching the sun going down and the crowds leaving the tower block, scuttling to Waterloo station and home.
When he was certain that most of them had gone, he went to the washroom and stared into the mirror above the sink. He waited for a few moments, heard a cleaner clatter by, and then slowly removed his hat.
Leon's hair was thick and wiry, like something you would use for scrubbing pans, but what was most striking about it was that i few hours earlier it had been dyed a virulent orange. Autumn (iold, it had said on the packet.
Leon winced as if he had been slapped. He quickly replaced his hat, gripped the brim with both hands and firmly pulled it down over his ears. It was a disaster. As always. Leon hated his hair. And Leon's hair hated him right back.
There was a line from a Rod Stewart song, back when Leon was fifteen years old and Rod was still big mates with John Peel and playing the working-class hero - kicking footballs around on Top of the Pops, pretending he was fresh off the terraces, before he developed that embarrassing taste for straw boaters and blazers and high-maintenance blondes and Art Deco lamps, and everyone had to pretend that they had never liked him in the first place.
It was the first line of the first track on Every Picture Tells A Story - the line that rhymed 'mirror' and 'inferior'. Leon always felt like that song had been written about him.
He knew there were battles to fight now. The middle ground was collapsing, and the Fascists were getting stronger. Not the public-bar bigots, the Alf Garnetts ranting on the sofa, but real Jew-baiting, Paki-bashing Fascists. Out there right now, getting bolder by the day, their numbers swelling, the hate spreading like a virus. Leon had seen their faces at Lewisham, clocked their proud Nazi salutes, and glimpsed what was inside them. There was nothing remotely funny about them, these dreamers of repatriation, these would-be builders of new ovens. Something had to be done.
So why the fuck, Leon asked himself, was he still worried about his hair? You didn't need a good haircut at the barricades.
He slung his record bag over his shoulder. Inside it was the latest edition of his fanzine, Red Mist. Too valuable to leave lying around the office, Leon believed. Someone might steal it.
The fanzine - a Xeroxed mix of radical politics, new music and cut-up kidnapper's graphics, hastily stapled together - had landed Leon his job on The Paper eighteen months ago, reminding some
34
35
of the older guys of their radical youth. But there were sighs and rolling eyes when Leon tried to sell Red Mist in the office, and when he said they should have more politics and less showbiz.
'We're a music paper, man,' they told him every day, as if the music could ever be separated from what was going on in the street, as if music wasn't a part of the real world but just some playpen that they climbed into for light entertainment.