Too Weird for Ziggy (3 page)

Spike turns his full clear gaze on him. “I'm sorry—”

“John Dawes. Finsbury Park Grammar School for Boys.” An edge to his voice. “Remember?”

And he tries. He really does. The name ricochets around inside his head like a pinball, shoots down alleyways and bounces off walls before dropping through the reject gap in the middle. It's hard when your past is just a press file of airbrushed photographs and quotable memories of memories. Spike mentally scans his record company biography and recent interviews for help. Nothing.

“Knocker Dawes. You borrowed my guitar. You touched up my sister.
You fucked my fucking wife!
” A laugh. Impossible to tell if he's inflicting humiliation or receiving it.

And suddenly Spike remembers. And a cold wave of guilt washes over him—a generic, all-purpose guilt encompassing everything, from failing to recognize an old friend to failing to be with his mother when she died and the last thing she hears about him being an eighteen-year-old girl's description of his dick. But no, he's jet-lagged, disoriented. Yesterday he was in Los Angeles in a recording studio, today he's in England, tomorrow's the funeral. Of course! His old friend, Knocker! Weird that another slice of his past should resurface right at this time. He offers him a full, photogenic smile.

“Thought I might run into you one of these days. I had Michael Caine through here a couple of weeks back. You
meet a lot of people in this business, all walks of life. They don't say much though. In and out like a whorehouse. You wouldn't believe some of the scum we get through here, Buttock.” The customs man has pulled a puffy square from the condom packet and is circling the rubber rim through the wrapper distractedly with forefinger and thumb. “If I had a fiver for every fuckwit who walks through here with a bellyload of drug-filled Durex–not a pretty sight, I'll tell you, when they burst. We had a bloke in the other day, swallowed a six-pack of heroin—two trainees in the back room spooning castor oil down his throat, waiting for it to come out the other end.”

People walk by, recognize Spike, point him out. It embarrasses him suddenly, like he was caught showing off in front of a friend. The customs man watches them, eyebrows raised.

“They all love you, don't they? They all want to touch you, prostrate themselves in front of you. Look at that woman. It's running down her legs, she wants you so much. You can tell the English from the Americans. That lot are English. They know exactly who you are but they just walk by, pretending not to look, making out they're not impressed. This one, she's American.”

A large woman detaches herself from her companion and comes over lopsidedly, weighed down on one side by a huge bag she keeps hitching back up onto her shoulder. She hooks her arm in his, her mouth two inches from his face. She says: “I know you.”

He can smell in-flight champagne, slept-in clothes, a cocktail of trapped gas, and all the duty-free perfumes she
tried on eleven hours ago. Spike looks straight into her eyes, not saying a word.

The customs man summons up the power of the entire British Government. “Madam. If you have something to declare, declare it
somewhere else
.”

“No need to be rude.” She huffs back over to where her friend is waiting. “It
was
him, you know.”

Spike feels a sinus headache kicking in. He always got them, flying. There was a curtain separating him from them but their bodies still intruded—the dust from their dead skin that circulated in the canned air for hours. The laundry smell of economy-section chicken mixed with the cheap burnt coffee kept the passages unblocked until he dis-embarked but then a swelling behind his eyes would try to force its way out of his nose and ears like balloons.

The customs man is turning over a pile of neatly folded clothes. He peels off a silk shirt, floppy, soft as skin, while Spike stands, hands in pockets, watching.

“Nice shirt. Expensive. You get to know these things in my line of work. I can tell straight off if something's fake. I can tell a phony Lacoste alligator at fifty yards. They think they've got it but they always make these little mistakes. I can tell you what fucking
street
in Hong Kong they bought the fake Rolex on. I know when I'm dealing with a big man or not. This shirt cost serious money. ‘The Real Thing'—how much did you make on that song? Half a million? A million? A mate of mine's brother works for a record company. He says popstars make a fucking fortune on royalties, and they're mean as hell, the lot of them. Only time they put their
hands in their pockets is to scratch their bollocks.” Spike tugs his hands out of his pocket automatically.

“My daughter—she picked up your first album at a boot fair the other day.
50p
. You had some good songs on that one, I'll admit that. A lot more cheerful than the stuff you're doing now. Getting a bit jazzy in your old age, aren't you? Going for the cred market? Can't whistle the new songs in the bath like the old ones. Do you ever stop and wonder what people are doing while they're listening to your songs? Fixing the car? Taking a dump? Getting dressed for work? Shagging? Funny that, you in the background while complete strangers are getting their end off. My daughter says she ‘works out' to your record. She's sixteen now, Linda. Too old for you judging by that one in the papers last week.
She
seemed to think pretty highly of you though. ‘Hung like a horse'? Shetland pony, more like. Ha-ha! Seen it in the school showers often enough. Remember when I caught you and Jonesy at it in the showers? Went back to get my trunks and there you were, Jonesy on his knees, and he wasn't playing the clarinet!

“It's all right, Buttock, your secret's safe with me. I was always good at catching people out, seeing the things they want to keep hidden. Comes in handy for the job.” He lays the shirt back in the suitcase, softly singing—a pretty fair Elton John imitation, as it happens—“‘
Don't let your son go down on me …
'”

“I wasn't a bad singer either, if I say so myself. Bloody sight better than you were anyway. I can't believe your luck, really I can't.
I
had a band for a while, you know? Of course
you don't know. Why would you? We played the pubs around North London for a couple of years, got quite a big following—only local, but there was talk at one point of making a record. ‘Greetings From Finsbury Park,' we were going to call it—press up a few hundred copies and flog them around the hood. But it all took too much time—rehearsals, late nights, the wives and girlfriends giving us grief. When Dawn got pregnant I chucked it in. I'm still writing songs though. I'll have to send you a tape of them, maybe you could do something with them—ha! I bet people say that to you all the time.”

At the next table, a customs man is standing by an open suitcase—triumphantly, ridiculously, wielding a large salami. Its soon-to-be-ex-owner is red-faced, arguing loudly. The customs man throws his colleague a sympathetic glance.

“First thing this morning I open this case and there, stuck in a bag of dirty underwear, is this huge hunk of meat wrapped in a cloth. And it's
crawling
with maggots. And this woman nearly rips my eyes out when I say she can't bring it into the country. The traveling public is so fucking stupid.
Stupid
. You wouldn't believe what some of them try and smuggle through”—official face and matching voice—“‘I'm sorry, sir, this is a serious contravention of British law under section 45 paragraph 7a of the Importation Act, now if you'll just hand it over.' And you pick up your clipboard and you turn the page and you ask for their passport and you watch the sweat break out and freeze under their eyes and you wait a while and then slowly you turn the page back and you say, ‘Go on. I'll let it go this time. But
next
time …,' and they grab their case and fumble with the zip like a kid caught by
his mum with his willy out, and the British public is saved from the scourge of smuggling and the offending article goes into your locker, perk of the job. Like all jobs—
normal
jobs, I mean, present company excepted. You do it for forty-odd years and at the end you've got a small house and a big wife and enough in the bank for the annual jaunt to the Costa Del Sol.
You've
got a nice house. Saw it in the wife's
Hello
magazine—swimming pool, Jacuzzi.
Ja-cooooo-zee
. Big-boobed bimbos jiggling in the bubbles. Dawn keeps going on at me that she wants a Jacuzzi—one of those indoor jobs, you know, bathtubs with dog nipples all over. Gave her a fiver and told her to go get a vindaloo and fart in the bathwater, same difference.

“Yeah, I married Dawn Burchill—your old girlfriend Minerva's mate. Small, big tits—you gave her one once, remember? She does. After a couple of drinks she tells
everyone
she's had sex with the great and glorious Spike—her mouth on your mouth, her mouth on your prick—she says you went down on her. Did you? She says, ‘Why don't you go down on me like Spike?'”

A young woman has been led to the table opposite. She and the officer are both bent down over the open case, their hair almost touching. At the customs man's raised voice, they turn simultaneously and look up at Spike like Siamese twins joined at the head.

“Your parents, do they still live in Finsbury Park? Your dad, I mean—sorry about your mum, I read it in the papers. Over for the funeral I suppose. No, of course you'd have moved them to someplace more salubrious. Hah! that wouldn't be hard to find. If you thought Finsbury Park was a
pit back then—well, we moved away eventually, bought a house around here. I always said I could never live in the suburbs, but anyone can live anywhere, can't they, when it comes down to it? We packed up when our youngest was born. Scarlett. Yeah, named after your song—the wife's idea. She said she wrote to you asking you to be godfather—nothing to do with me, she only told me a short while back. She said she never heard back from you. I suppose you didn't get the letter. Ha! Don't worry about it. No, seriously, I'm sure you get asked that sort of thing all the time. Letters like that probably don't even reach you. You pay people to make sure the great unwashed don't intrude on your life, don't ‘invade your space,' don't pollute your pure air. What's the view like from up there, Buttock? I mean, how
do
we appear to you?”

The people from economy class crowd by with cheap suitcases piled up on trolleys. Spike hears his name muttered and whispered as they pass. His head is throbbing. It feels like a washing machine stuffed with the contents of a thousand dirty laundry bags, churning.

The customs man pulls a paperback from a corner of Spike's suitcase. He reads out the title. “
Life and How to Survive It
.” He tosses it back in the case. His cheeks are livid. “Jesus H. Christ! If
you're
not satisfied, what fucking hope is there for the rest of us? You've got it all, Buttock, don't you. Living like a kid on a grown man's money—well, good luck to you, mate. Good fucking luck to you. There but for fortune. There but for one great fucking stroke of fate.”

Red hands shaking, he tidies up the suitcase.

And all at once an image flashes into Spike's mind, so vivid he might have been looking at it in a magazine. It's
Knocker's bedroom. His new carpet—electric blue with red, black, and yellow swirls. His old wallpaper—“Animals of the Jungle,” he remembers, and it makes him laugh. Knocker said they couldn't take it down because the British government had designated it a historic inner-city treasure. You could barely see the wall for posters anyway—Beatles, Stones, Arsenal Football Club, and that enormous map of the world he had, with the handmade flyer pinned onto America that said ‘Knocker and the Dawes Tour the Universe 1965.' On a low bookcase stacked with records was the regulation one-piece, blue vinyl record player they all had. And Knocker's there on the bed, playing along to the record on his big cheap acoustic guitar, and he's on the floor, back against the wall, tapping out a rhythm on a Monopoly box lid, and Knocker's father is yelling up the stairs to keep the bloody noise down and hasn't he got a home to go to, and back home Mum's got the dinner on, the house smells of pork chops and brown sauce, and she's telling him he'd better get the table laid before his dad gets home from work. Poor Dad. Wonder how they're all holding up.

Spike reaches a hand across the table.

The customs man pulls his hand away.

“I'm all right. You don't have to lose any sleep over me. No need to lose any of your beauty fucking sleep. I'm sorry. I'm a bit tired. Had a hard week. Night shifts. Long hours. Fluorescent lights. Ultraviolet deprivation. I'm slowly crumbling, you know? The blood's slowed down. If you bumped into me now I'd crumple up like papier fucking mâché. You could turn me upside down and shake me out and I'd just be full of dust, like a vacuum cleaner bag.

“Do you want to know what's frightening, Buttock? Really fucking frightening? Watching what's happening to yourself and not being able to do a thing about it. Like those dreams where they're disemboweling you and you're paralyzed and you're watching it all going on and you know exactly what is going to happen to you but you can't move, there's not a fucking thing you can do.”

The customs man rolls the numbers back around on the combination lock.

“Well, there you go then. And give my best to your old man. Spike Mattock, would you believe it? One of us made it. Bloody fucking marvelous, isn't it? It makes you feel proud. Dawn and the girls are going to get a real kick out of this when I tell them.” He lifts the case down onto the floor.

“Could I have your autograph?”

“Famous for fifteen minutes?” The head of A&R was expounding into the speakerphone, something that he very much liked to do. “Fuck that, man. Everyone's gonna have their own fucking
TV
channel.” Behind his back they called him BB, short for Buddha Boy, because he was young and soft and fat and had a sweet, sly smile on his baby face like he could bring you back in your next life as a prince or a peanut as soon as look at you. Which, musicbizly speaking, he could, that being the A&R man's job. Smiling benignly at the present beneficiary of his divine intervention, the Comeback Artist du jour, who was sitting upright in his chair on the other side of the enormous desk, BB leaned back in his leather swivel chair, feet on the desk-edge, swaying his hips from side to side to some private rhythm, like a fat housewife at the gym.