This was all true, by the way; no exaggeration. After that incident, I'd decided the de Ville was maybe a bit too highly powered for Jasmine; she'd only passed her test that spring, after all, and the twelve cylinder Jaguar engine was tuned-up to lay about four hundred horsepower on the road, if you kicked the beast hard enough.
I'd rung up Panther and asked if there was any way of sort of shutting off half the cylinders or something, bur the dealer said no, there wasn't, in a voice that seemed to want to ask me whether I was certain I was really fit to own such a fine motor.
I'd have switched to another car but I didn't want to let the de Ville our of my sight; I'd mislaid five grand's worth of coke in the upholstery somewhere when I'd been drunk, and I was still looking for it.
I remembered stashing the drug, but not exactly where; as well as being drunk and stoned I'd been in a severe paranoid fugue, nor simply because I was carrying the stuff but because we were in the middle of Hyde Park at lunchtime, and Jasmine had the Panther doing fifty miles an hour over the grass, scattering sunbathers like startled grouse and accounting for at least two brace of deckchairs.
We'd had an argument about sex; Jasmine wanted some and I had prioritised getting to the record company office for a Rolling Stone photo session above finding the nearest drive-through car wash and parking in it while Jas climbed into the back with me and took off her uniform. She calmed down eventually and somehow we got out of the park without being arrested, but in all the excitement I forgot I'd planted the coke in a Safe Place and didn't remember until a week later when we were starting to run out of the stuff. I knew I hadn't thrown it out of a door or window because Jas had found a way of locking them all so I couldn't jump out. Anyway, I was still looking for the cocaine and when I did find it Jasmine wasn't getting any, not when she was driving, not after that last time on the M6.
'Thought it was speed, didn't I?' Jasmine giggled roguishly.
'Oh, very funny, Jas.' The tractor had cleared the road. I nodded forward. 'Road's clear, Jasmine.'
'Go on,' she said, winking at me. 'Just one glass.'
Inez put her magazine down. 'Jasmine,' she said tiredly.
'I...' Jas began. Then a fusillade of car horns sounded from behind us. Jas looked unconcernedly over our shoulders through the rear window, then put both elbows on the back of her seat. 'Come on,' she said. 'I drive better smashed.'
'I wish she wouldn't use that word,' Wes muttered, shaking his head and looking at the earth bank opposite. The honking noises behind us increased.
'Jas,' I said, pointing forward again, 'just drive.' I pressed the button that elevated the glass screen between us, and Jasmine's elbows were slowly lifted up; her face assumed a look of annoyance, and as the glass hissed up into place she was turning round to look furiously at a small red Mini, squeezing past us from behind. She lowered her window and started shouting inaudibly at the car and giving it the finger. I listened in via the intercom.
'-unt!' Jas' tinny voice shouted. 'Ever been fist fucked? Wanna start?' I turned the intercom off again. The car leapt away, spilling more champagne. I rocked back in my seat. The Panther was accelerating hard, the grassy banks and hedgerows blurring past. The rear of the red Mini was rapidly coming closer. I stabbed at the intercom button again.
'And don't you dare run that car off the road, you bitch! Just slow down! You know what happened the last time! I'm warning you!' Jas stamped on the brakes, looked round glaring at me, then threw her champagne-coloured chauffeuse's cap down into the footwell. She settled down to thirty miles an hour and thereafter drove hunched up over the wheel with her epauletted shoulders set in their 'I do not want to talk about it' position. I dried my hands again and sat back in the seat.
'She's got to go,' Inez said, turning a page in her Cosmopolitan.
'She's right; it's you or her,' Wes told me. I shook my head.
'I'll keep her on till I learn to drive myself,' I told them. Inez guffawed. Wes looked away at the fields again, shaking his head.
'Wes,' Inez said, putting the magazine down and looking at him seriously.
'Yeah?'
'Are you serious about this... bugging?'
'Sure.' He nodded. He took the silver cigarette case from the rosewood table set between Inez and me and took out a joint. 'Yeah; of course.' He used the cigar lighter, sat back, looking at Inez and me in turn. Inez pursed her lips.
'Well, I'm not staying in your house then, Weston. I'll find a hotel in Newquay. How about you?' She asked me. I shrugged, took one of the spliffs as well.
Beautifully rolled. This was the other reason I kept Jas on.
That and the fact that her father was a gangster from the East End and she'd threatened to tell him I'd raped her if I didn't keep her near me. I didn't fancy a radical penisectomy just then so I agreed. Jas wanted me to screw her but I was half-terrified that if I ever did she'd develop an even closer attachment and I'd never get rid of her (elephantiasis of the ego is endemic amongst rock stars, never forget), and also half-reluctant not to have her around. She was a pet, a conversation piece. She had character. It was all bad, but she had it.
'Well?' Inez said, pointedly. I sighed. I still wanted to stay at Wes' place; it would be something different. But Inez probably expected me to come with her .
'Yeah, all right,' I said. 'Hotel.' I gestured with the flats of my hands to Wes. 'Sorry,' I told him.
'Hey, that's all right, man.' Wes stared out over a low hedge at the sloping fields and towards the distant line of surf breaking on the rocks of the north Cornish coast. 'Still a free country,' he muttered, then sighed and said, 'hey; let's put on some sounds. Too quiet in here.'
Jasmine eventually passed the red Mini on a straight stretch of A class road. She cut in sharply and the Mini flashed its lights at her, but at least she didn't spill any champagne.
Ah, Jesus, big houses, fast cars and sleek women. Fame and fortune; nothing wrong with it as long as you're young enough to enjoy it and old enough to control it.
The others didn't make as much as I did, but they all made a lot. We hit the industry at a good time, when albums were selling well. We peaked in the UK in '78, the same year the greatest number of records were sold, and by then we were big in the States too; big worldwide, in fact. Far too much has been written already about what we represented, where we fitted in and what we stood for, but I suppose there's some truth in it all somewhere, and I guess I would go along with the idea we were a sort of half step towards punk; just different enough to be novel, not quite mad enough to be a threat.
We fell between two stools and made our piles, if you want the gist of it. We were claimed as being all sorts of things; we had a foot in more camps than we had feet to put them in. We were the band that made your brain think and your foot tap at the same time (not a trick everybody can manage, mind you; there are some real thickets around). We had — dare I say it — class.
And we were the band whose gimmick was... music. Oh, yes, we had that reputation, God knows how. I was immensely proud of it at the time but it all seems meaningless now. We put our songs together differently, we used different patterns of musical development, unusual chords, unlikely but convincing layers of sound. Hell, all I was trying to do was sound just the same as everybody else; those were my attempts to be normal, for God's sake. I just kept getting it wrong, that was all.
But when anyone asked how we did it, how we'd got where we had, I used to tell them that it was just the tunes. That was it. In the end it's the music that sells. Tunes people can remember and hum and whistle and plunk out on their own guitars.