The Rotters' Club (21 page)

Doug had left the
NME
offices with mixed feelings. True, he hadn’t got to meet Tony Parsons, or Julie Burchill, or Nick Logan, or Charles Shaar Murray; but he had left with a stack of free records under his arm. True, he would have liked these records to have been white label copies of ‘New Rose’, ‘Anarchy in the UK’ and the first Eddie and the Hot Rods album; instead, Richard had given him ‘Money Money Money’ by Abba, ‘Ring Out Solstice Bells’ by Jethro Tull and ‘Morning Glory’ by The Wurzels. And it was flattering, of course, to have been given a commission to cover something as important as the first Rock Against Racism gig; but it would have been even better if Doug had been able to find the venue.

Apparently it was taking place in a pub called The Princess Alice in Forest Gate. Doug didn’t possess anything as practical as a London
A-Z,
so he was reduced to approaching strangers at Blackfriars tube and asking them how to get there. The first three people he asked ignored him completely. The fourth one denied that there was any such place as Forest Gate. Doug told him that it was somewhere in East London. The stranger shook his head and said that he must be talking about Forest Hill, which was in South London. Doug assured him that it was Forest Gate, but agreed it was sensible to assume that Forest Hill and Forest Gate might be next to each other. So the stranger told him how to get to Forest Hill. It was extremely complicated. This part of London wasn’t covered by the tube network: you had to go by bus, or British Rail, or both. The connections were difficult, and Doug spent more than forty minutes waiting at a stop in Camberwell while successive buses coasted by, crammed to the full with exhausted commuters going home for the weekend. When he did get on a bus, finally, it took him to the wrong place.

It was eight o’clock when he reached Forest Hill. The first person he asked told him there was no such pub as The Princess Alice. Doug told him that it was in Forest Gate, which he had been assured was near by. The man told him that Forest Gate was in East London, across the river towards Romford, about ten miles away. Doug’s eyes widened in horror, and once again he felt that he was standing in the lift at King’s Reach Tower, plummeting down from the twenty-third floor. The man apologized – not that it was his fault, strictly speaking, that Forest Gate was in East London – and Doug consoled himself by going to the nearest pub, which was called The Man in the Moon, not The Princess Alice, and drinking two pints of lager. In a rare stroke of good fortune, the barman didn’t ask how old he was.

So it was official, anyway: his trip to London was a fiasco. What could he salvage from it, in order to avoid humiliation when he got back to school on Monday morning and had to face the questioning of his friends?

There was no chance of battling all the way over to Forest Gate at this time of night. He would have to phone the office in a few days and apologize to Richard, who hadn’t sounded too bothered about the review anyway. No doubt, from their perspective, it would be no great loss. Yes, there was still time to get back to Euston and catch a train to Birmingham, but that was too dreadful to contemplate. This was his weekend of escape, his great adventure. In an uncomfortable corner at the back of his mind lingered the thought that he still had nowhere to stay, but he dismissed it for now. There were bound to be youth hostels in London, or cheap hotels. He could find something. Meanwhile he took out his copy of the
NME
and looked again at the gig guide. The Clash were playing at Fulham Old Town Hall, wherever that was, with The Vibrators and Roogalator. He had ten pounds in his pocket. Surely it would cost less than that to get there by taxi?

*

It was a fantastic night. You could lose yourself in this noise. Little problems like the fact that you had no money and nowhere to stay dissolved in the sea of chords and sweat and beer and feedback and pounding bodies throwing themselves manically up and down in a distant approximation to the rhythm of the music. Doug had never heard any of these songs before but in the months and years to come they would become his closest friends: ‘Deny’, ‘London’s Burning’, ‘Janie Jones’. He was transfixed by the sight and sound of Joe Strummer shouting, screaming, singing, howling into the microphone: the hair lank with sweat, the veins on his neck tautened and pulsing with blood. Doug surrendered to the noise and for an hour he pogoed like a madman in the dense, heaving heart of a crowd two hundred or more strong. The heat and the energy were overwhelming. When it was over he stumbled to the bar and jostled for place as the fans clamoured to slake their thirst. He was pushed and shoved and he pushed and shoved back with the best of them and he felt, for the first time that day, wonderfully and unexpectedly at home.

Then, suddenly, there was a tap on his shoulder and he was staring at a face which should have been familiar, although he didn’t at first know why.

‘Hello! It’s you again!’ said a voice which might have belonged to a BBC continuity announcer. ‘Gosh, isn’t this a
hoot
!’

Then he remembered. It was the woman from the lift at King’s Reach Tower. He hadn’t recognized her in her leathers and T-shirt. Her blonde hair was slicked back and the sweat was causing her make-up to run and she no longer looked stocky or comical but achingly sexy.

‘Oh, hi!’ he said.

‘Can I get you a drink?’ She was nearer to the bar than him.

‘Thanks. Lager, please.’

When they had forced their way out of the throng, she led him to a spare corner where two men of about her own age, neither of them dressed for the occasion, were leaning against a wall glancing warily around them, as if expecting (with some reason) to be attacked at any moment.

‘This is Jacko, and Fudge,’ the woman said. ‘Boys, this is –’

‘Douglas,’ he prompted, not quite knowing why he was using the full name.

‘And I’m Ffion.’ She held out her hand. ‘Ffion ffoulkes. With four “f”s.’

‘Four?’ said Doug.

‘Two in each name.’

He didn’t understand a word of this, but let it pass.

‘Douglas is a journalist for the
NME,
’ she explained, proudly. ‘Are you going to write about this concert?’

‘No, not tonight. I’m just here as a punter.’

‘Well I thought the last lot were
awfully
good,’ Ffion said. ‘My goodness, they gave it what for! My ears are ringing like nobody’s business.’

Fudge said nothing and Jacko yawned.

‘Look, Fee, are we going to slope off soon? This racket’s brought on a stinking headache and all these proles are giving me the willies.’

‘We might catch something unspeakable,’ Fudge added.

‘I’m a “prole” myself, actually,’ said Doug, his hackles rising.

‘Douglas is from Birmingham,’ Ffion told her friends.

‘Oh, hard cheese,’ said Jacko. ‘What rotten luck, old boy.’

‘I must say you’ve picked up our lingo frightfully well,’ said Fudge, beaming. ‘I can understand you almost perfectly.’

Doug, on the other hand, was having great difficulty understanding this peculiar pair, whose accents were even more alien than Ffion’s to his unpractised ear. It didn’t help that when he could decipher what they were saying, he had some trouble believing it.

‘I can’t see the point of a place like Birmingham, myself,’ said Jacko. ‘Full of Pakis, isn’t it?’

‘Pakis and proles,’ Fudge confirmed.

Doug turned away from them wordlessly and said to Ffion, ‘Could we go and talk somewhere else? I think your friends are the stupidest pair of stuck-up wankers I’ve ever met.’

Jacko seized him by the neck of his T-shirt and said, ‘Look here, pipsqueak. How would you like a bunch of fives smack in the middle of your oiky little face?’

‘Try it,’ Doug answered. ‘But I think you should know I’ve got a flick-knife in my pocket.’

Jacko released his grip slowly. His face was drained of what little colour it had once possessed when he turned to Ffion. ‘Come on, Fee. I said we’d meet McSquirter and the rest of the gang down at Parson’s.’

‘I’m staying here.’

They stared at each other for a few angry seconds, then Jacko stamped his foot in fury and walked off.

‘You silly little tart,’ said Fudge, following him.

Ffion and Doug sipped their lager in silence for a while. She was smiling at him again.

‘Have you really got a knife?’ she asked.

‘No, of course not.’

She leaned over suddenly and gave him a fierce, open-mouthed kiss. It tasted of lager and lipstick.

‘You’re a sweetie,’ she said. ‘What about some cocoa and rumpy-pumpy back at my place?’

‘OK,’ said Doug, ninety per cent certain that he had interpreted this invitation correctly. ‘Can I stay the night?’

‘Of course you can.’

*

Doug lost something important that night. Not his virginity, which had already been surrendered to a co-operative fifth-former from the girls’ school at the age of fourteen, in a tiny Left Bank hotel on one of Mr Plumb’s invaluable weekend outings to Paris. What he yielded, instead, to the preposterously named Ffion ffoulkes was less easy to define, but in its way just as impossible to recover. It had to do with his sense of self, his sense of belonging, his loyalty to the place and the family he came from. In the space of a few hours, a lifelong allegiance was severed, and a newer, more tenuous one formed. That night, in short, he became enamoured of the upper classes.

He became enamoured of where they lived. As he walked with Ffion through the icy rain of that October night, heading back towards the studio on the King’s Road her father had impulsively bought for her one weekend, he fell in love with Chelsea’s solemn Georgian terraces and reposeful, well-fed squares. Here, Doug could see, life was lived on a grand scale. Rednal seemed mean and wizened by comparison.

He became enamoured of how they lived, too. He admired the cluttered Bohemianism of her flat, the careless way that beanbags and Afghan rugs jostled for attention with a full-length portrait, thick with oilpaint, of a bright-eyed woman in tweeds who Ffion later identified as her mother. She told Doug the name of the artist and could hardly believe that he’d never heard of him. He could hardly believe that she had paintings by famous artists on the wall of her flat. Everything that night seemed new and surprising, and Doug also became enamoured of the upper-class ways of eating, drinking, waking the neighbours up with deafening music, taking drugs and, of course, having sex, which he had never realized could be so boisterous, cheery, polymorphous or strenuous an experience.

‘You mean you’ve never tried it this way before?’ Ffion would ask, with bright incredulity, having arranged herself into some implausible position which like as not required her to address him through the crook of her elbow or from beneath the arch of her left knee. ‘You’re not a virgin, are you, Duggie?’

Some hours later, as she clung to him by a tuft of his hair and locked his head firmly between her legs, his tongue working at her clitoris with steady, unflagging enthusiasm, she suddenly let out a high whinny like a thoroughbred pony and said, with a delighted sigh: ‘Oh Duggie, isn’t this topping? I think I could keep going all weekend.’

‘Me too,’ said Doug, truthfully but indistinctly.

‘What a… bother,’ Ffion added, forming the words as best she could through the ripples of sensation that his labours were continuing to stir up inside her, ‘that I’m expected for lunch tomorrow… in Gerrards Cross.’

‘Cancel it,’ came Doug’s muffled voice.

‘But it’s with my – oooh! – fiancé’s parents.’

He stopped abruptly, and looked up. His face wore an expression of profound astonishment that would have been comic even if his hair hadn’t been pulled wildly out of shape, and his mouth smeared with pubic hair and vaginal juices.

‘You’re engaged?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ Ffion answered glumly. ‘And to the most frightful bore.’

‘When will you be back?’

‘Not till Sunday night. I think we’re going riding.’

Doug raised himself on to one arm and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. In a flash, he realized that he would never see Ffion again. In another flash, it occurred to him that he didn’t really mind.

‘That’s all right,’ he said, and kissed each of her nipples in turn before beginning to trace a line with his mouth back across her stomach and her belly-button and towards the wiry haven beyond.

‘I’ve got masses of homework this weekend anyway.’

Ffion grabbed him by the hair again and yanked him back up into her line of vision. Now it was her turn to look astonished.

‘Homework?’ she said. ‘You mean – you’re still at school?’

‘That’s right.’

Their eyes met, and all at once it seemed to both of them that they were sharing the most exquisite hash– and music– and sex-and alcohol-fuelled joke. They burst into laughter, and laughed and laughed until the breath had left them and their entangled naked bodies were helpless and heaving. Doug was the first to recover his speech, but all he managed to say, in a high-pitched mockery of her own perfect vowels, was ‘What a
hoot!’,
and that set her off again, shrieking like a nervy adolescent, so that anyone passing in the corridor outside might have thought that Doug had started to tickle her, instead of returning one more time to the succulent exertions that waited for him between Ffion’s sheened and glistening legs.

5

‘So – are you ready to go out?

‘I’m just going to put this record here, for now. I wanted to talk to you about it, but we’ll do that later.

‘I think you’ll need a coat. It’s really been getting wintry out there, the last few days.

‘All set? You’d better lead on. I keep getting lost in this place. All those corridors.

‘Hang on, hang on, we don’t have to go quite that fast. We’ve got all afternoon, you know.

‘That’s better.

‘I suppose you can’t wait to get out.

‘There – I told you it was going to be nippy, didn’t I? Come on, let me tuck that scarf in. Give your neck a bit of protection. That’s it. This coat’s lasted you a little while, hasn’t it? I remember you wearing that in the fifth form. This one’s new. Mum got it for me last month. Said she was sick of me wearing Uncle Len’s old greatcoat. It went off to the jumble sale, in the end.