The Singer (49 page)

They all liked Mouse,
they really did. He seemed not to mind working his arse off for fuck-all money so long as he got to hang out with the bands he thought were cool. He was funny too, with his quickfire delivery and his pained attempts to keep his hair perfect against all the odds of his chosen profession. But none of them wanted to know about it that night. All Mouse could have heard was the continual cracking
of cans being opened and Zippos clanging open and shut. In the end he’d gone up the front to sit with Earl, leaving them to their introspective misery.

Kevin was the only one who wasn’t numbing himself with drink or some kind of drug, legal or otherwise. Kevin still read the local papers and fanzines he picked up wherever they went to try to get a better idea of this strange new country they
were in. Kevin still got his camera out and faithfully recorded each venue and truckstop and sight of interest along the way. He still had a notebook in which he diligently wrote down notes on each gig and ideas for new songs. Lynton guessed that, unlike the rest of them, Kevin was doing this to try his best to hold on to some sanity and normality, the way he had always done.

Keep your head down,
Kevin, and with luck the fists will fly above your head. He had gone to his bunk about two hours ago with the earplugs they’d been given on the plane.

Lynton and Steve had carried on ploughing their way through tonight’s slab of Budweiser. ‘Fucking weak, pissy, Yankee crap,’ was Steve’s opinion on that. ‘What I wouldn’t give for a decent pint of Tetley’s. I tell you what, Lynt, I’d rather be
back in Hull.’

Then he’d done his trick of falling asleep with the crushed can still inside his fist. He’d fallen over sideways since, into a foetal position, his Homburg hat tipped over his eyes.

Lynton wished so hard that he could sleep. He’d thought that reading might help him nod off. But maybe it had just been the wrong choice of book, Flannery O’Connor’s
Wise Blood
.

The sign flashed past
in the Silver Bullet’s huge headlamps as Earl steered them into the next state.

The Heart of Dixie
. Sweet Home Alabama.

Load in was at 4pm at Cropper’s Lounge, a long, low building made out of clapboard with a big neon sign over the door, on the Southside of Birmingham. This was supposed to be the liberal side of town, where a cabal of artists and writers had set up shop in the early seventies.
The youthful rebellion had slowly spread out from their revolutionary bookshops, coffee shops and bars to fashion the area into the live venue hub of the city. So Kevin informed them, as Earl drove them in from the motel on the outskirts of the city where they had been allowed to crash out for most of the day.

Lynton vaguely took in what he was saying, staring out of the window at the high ridge
of the Appalachian mountains, which rose up like great, jagged giant’s teeth, green and grey under the scudding clouds. They were so much bigger than any mountains he’d ever seen before that they almost looked as if they had been painted onto the sky.

He hadn’t managed to sleep until they’d disembarked the Silver Bullet at four in the morning. Then, when he’d finally got a surprisingly enormous
double bed in front of him, he’d crashed straight out. Luckily, Lynton got to share with Kevin on this tour; Steve was bunking in with Mouse, so he didn’t have any of the usual snoring and farting to put up with. His slumbers had seemed blissful at the time, but now he felt woozy, the way you did when you’d slept through the middle of the day, and he’d woken up with the same headache, a dull fuzz
in the side of his head.

Kevin had some headache pills; they came in a little plastic dispenser here like Tic-Tacs back at home and were just about as effective. Maybe what he needed was some food; they were due to get some once they turned up at the venue.

Marty Cropper, the guy who owned the bar, was obviously one of the old hippies from Kevin’s guidebook. A tall, rangy man with long frizzy
hair tied back into a ponytail, and a matching handlebar moustache and sideburns that had probably been bright red once, but were now softened out with an abundance of grey. He and Earl greeted each other with slaps on the back as if they were friends from way back. They certainly had the same aura about them, like two outlaw bikers who had come to heel a bit in their middle age, but not that much.

Inside Cropper’s Lounge was a horseshoe bar with a seating area to the left, red leather booths around the outside, smaller, round pine tables in the middle and the obligatory pool table. Narrow and skinny from the front, it went back a long way, with a big dance floor and a wide stage beyond it, decorated with steers’ horns and red velvet drapes. Psychedelic posters covered almost every wall,
but there were a few more modern ones: the
London Calling
cover and
Never Mind the Bollocks
.

Lynton started to relax a bit as he looked around; this wasn’t the hillbilly hellhole he had been expecting. Genial Marty ushered them into the booths, brought them pitchers of cold beer, iced water, corn chips and salsa and the menus. The freak show divided into its usual components: Vince and Sylvana
sat with Nik, the rest of them took over a corner. The only difference to usual was that Earl joined them this time, when he normally ate alone.

The food came fast and the plates were piled high. Once he had half a warm, spicy burrito inside him, Lynton found he was actually enjoying himself.

‘Hey Earl, you know this guy?’ asked Mouse, after Marty had deposited another jug of beer and iced water
and taken away the empties.

Earl, sucking the meat off a spare rib with his moustache drooping over the side, nodded his head. ‘Uh-huh. We were in the Marines together.’

‘No way!’ said Mouse. ‘That’s some coincidence.’

‘Not really.’ Earl put the gnawed bone down and reached for a toothpick. ‘We buddied up in Korea, rode together for a while after we got back. His interests have always been
the same as mine, ’n’ this job takes me out this way often enough.’ He nodded towards Nik, sitting across the room listening avidly to whatever Sylvana was saying as he picked daintily through a salad. ‘I always try and make sure if I take a band out, they play a night in this place. Marty’s good people. You don’t get a lot like him out these ways.’

‘Where exactly you from, Earl?’ Mouse continued
his interview.

‘Bacon County, Georgia.’

‘You’re shitting me?’ Mouse laughed.

Earl grimaced stoically, as if he was used to this response. ‘Bacon County, Georgia. You look it up on the map, dumb rodent.’

‘What’s it like there?’ asked Steve.

‘Shit,’ said Earl, simply. ‘Hard land, hard people. I signed up for Korea, they didn’t have to come and git me. That’d tell you just about all you needed
to know.’

Steve nodded admiringly. ‘Right. Mebbe they should twin it with Hull, where we come from.’

‘You folks all come from Shit too?’ Earl let a small smile curl around his top lip. ‘Well, apart from Mouse here, ’cos we all know he come from Fairyland. It ain’t so bad though, is it? Think about it. If we all didn’t come from Shit in the first place, we wouldn’t have had nothin’ to get away
from.’

His words stirred something in Lynton’s brain. ‘That sounds like a line from that book I was reading.’

‘Flannery O’Connor, yes, sir, it is,’ Earl winked at him. ‘I saw you reading that. That’s a great piece of art, that book.’

‘Get to fuck!’ exploded Mouse. ‘Earl’s an artist and we didn’t know it.’

Earl’s sardonic grimace returned and he cuffed the roadie round his shaved head like
a large bear might reprimand his cub. The laughter went on as Mouse rolled about in his seat, squeaking expletives and pretending to be mortally injured. Earl got to his feet, shaking his head. ‘Now if you gentlemen will excuse me, I’m headed back to my bunk. I’ll see y’all later.’ He doffed his Stetson and turned to go, then had another thought and turned back to look at Lynton.

‘You folks take
my advice and make the most of ol’ Marty’s hospitality here tonight. There ain’t nothing else worth seeing round here, you don’t mind me saying.’

As he said it, that tiny worm of fear started to uncoil again in Lynton’s stomach and the smile froze on his face as he watched Earl walk away.

No one else had read any other meaning into those words. They all carried on laughing and joking. He tried
to push it out of his mind, reassuring himself that nothing bad could happen to him here, not in a liberal hippy place owned by an ex-Marine who could probably dismantle a redneck with his bare hands.

But that worm, it wouldn’t go away. It wriggled all through soundcheck, so he had to concentrate hard on what would normally come naturally, so that he was all fingers and thumbs over the easiest
of parts. It twisted and turned as they met the support band, a local three-piece called Three-Legged Dog. It wouldn’t let him take in what they were playing when it was their turn to warm up, except that the singer had one of those harsh old Appalachian voices he would have expected to hear from a grizzled old man who played a banjo, not a regular-looking guy with short hair who was about twenty.

Give me a beer, the worm seemed to say to him, give me a beer and I might go away. All right, he thought. I’ll make the most of ol’ Marty’s hospitality.

Marty’s backstage spread was the best they’d ever had. More Mexican food, a bottle of tequilla and decent-looking beer
called Dos Equis. Lynton started getting stuck into those, and felt an immediate relief as the first one went down. Then Vince
picked up the tequilla, holding it up to the light and studying the yellow liquid. ‘I’ve heard this is good,’ he said. ‘Anyone want to give it a try?’

‘You wanna be careful on that,’ Sylvana warned him. ‘That stuff can turn you funny.’

Vince looked at her with the most disdainful expression any of them had ever seen him use on his new bride. ‘Sweetheart,’ he said, ‘isn’t it time you were powdering
your nose or something?’

Lynton saw the shock and hurt bloom in her eyes. Then she meekly caved in. ‘Sure, honey,’ she whispered. ‘I didn’t mean to cramp your style.’ She sat back down in the furthest corner of the room. Nik jumped up and went over to her side, started gabbling away to try and hide the embarrassment of the moment.

Vince didn’t even bother to look her way. Instead, he fixed his
gaze on Lynton. ‘Lynton,’ he said, his eyes glittering. The bleary mess who’d so nearly ruined everything the night before seemed to have vanished. In its place, spruce Vince looked razor-sharp in the Smith & Wesson T-shirt he’d picked up in a truckstop, black Sta-prest trousers and his big brothel creepers. ‘You game?’

Lynton shrugged. Vince unscrewed the bottle, poured out a shot and handed
it over. Then he poured one for himself and raised up his glass. ‘Cheers!’ he said.

Lynton sensed a challenge in Vince’s eyes. The worm squirmed to rise to it. ‘Cheers!’ he returned. They clinked glasses and then poured the liquor down their throats.

‘Wow,’ Lynton licked his lips. ‘That’s really good.’

It was as well. The tequilla seemed to anaesthetise the worm and filled him up instead with
a pleasing glow. ‘Give us another one, Vince.’

After they’d downed another two, Steve grabbed the bottle out of Vince’s hands.

‘Give us it here, you great puff,’ he said, and raised the whole thing to his lips. A second later he was coughing and spluttering. ‘Fucking hell!’ he said. ‘That’s fucking dynamite.’

The bottle had gone before the support band got onstage. Their enthusiasm for its
contents seemed to wipe away all the animosity between them, and they found themselves laughing together for the first time in months. It was like Sylvana and all the rest of the baggage faded to the back of the room, out of sight, out of mind. When they heard Three-Legged Dog starting their set, Steve nodded towards the door.

‘Let’s go and check them out,’ he said. ‘They seemed like good lads.’

Out the front, the place was packed. To Lynton’s relief, it all seemed to be students, hippies and a smattering of punks. They stood in front of the stage and cheered on the Dog, who played a harsh, angular type of stripped-down blues, made all the more compelling by the vocals. The tequilla making him light-headed, Lynton found his mind conjuring up all sorts of visions to that keening, hard-lived-in
voice. It reminded him of Earl’s Hank Williams tapes and the shapes of the mountains that surrounded this city, a voice directly descended from the Scottish crofters who’d been displaced here, bringing nothing but their songs and stories with them.

‘High and lonesome, dead and gone,’
he caught above the sound of the singer’s guitar. That voice resounded with all of those qualities. Told it like
it must have been a hundred years ago.

Vince, however, didn’t seem quite so taken with the music as with what they’d just been drinking.

‘I’m gonna find that Marty,’ he declared. ‘I’m gonna get us another bottle of tequilla.’ And he plunged off through the crowd towards the bar.

Vince didn’t return until the band had finished and Steve and Lynton had gone back into the dressing room to offer
their congratulations. Lynton was really drunk now, but it
was in a good way, the worm had gone and with it, the sense of disorientation. Now he felt like he could strap on his bass and play note perfect, that he’d left all his fears behind in the bottom of that yellow bottle. He’d been wrong about tonight, it was going to be the best gig of the tour, the one that brought them all back together.

Then Vince came through the door.

‘Did you not find Marty, then?’ Steve clocked his empty hands.

‘I’ve just seen something I shouldn’t have seen,’ said Vince.

‘You what?’ Steve frowned. ‘You been doing drugs or summat?’

‘No,’ Vince screwed up his brow. ‘I wish I had.’

‘Then what’s up with yer?’

At that moment, Marty’s head came round the door. ‘Five minutes, folks, if you’d be so kind,’
he said.

‘Look…’ Vince started, looked at Lynton and then stopped. ‘Look, it’s nothing. My lovely wife was right. That stuff really does fuck with your head. Come on, let’s do it.’