Terry smiled politely. It was funny - he could see that - but was it quite as funny as Misty was making out? Was she planning to read the whole book out loud? Was it going to be like this all the way to Sheffield? Was it going to be like this for the next fifty years?
He could hardly stand to admit it, but it was suddenly all a little bit different. With Misty, and with The Paper too. He began leafing through the latest issue. It was a good issue. The kind of issue that would have had his heart beating faster when he was out there in reader-land, travelling up to the city to buy The Paper a day early with all the other true believers.
Young Elvis on the cover in all his greasy pomp. Pages of tributes and memories and reflections from some of the older guys. Ray's interview with Lennon. And the new guy tearing Dag Wood to bits for spending most of his gig at the Rainbow squatting behind the amps, his leather trousers down by his ankles, clutching his stomach and groaning.
And - who would have thought it? - the diary mention of a band called Electric Baguette who wore Italian suits and played synthetic dance music and said they were bored with politics, they just wanted to make pop music and money. Brainiac had finally formed his band, and everybody seemed to think they were going to be the next hot thing. Funny how time slipped away - it was no longer the Sex Pistols that filled the sky for the new groups, but Chic. How quickly the new music - the new anything - became old hat. There was a rumour that Brainiac had even had his teeth fixed. But Terry closed The Paper, feeling curiously unmoved by all of it.
Partly it was the ham-fisted, infantile quality of much of the writing - one of the older guys had compared Elvis to Jay Gatsby, 'the hero of F. Scott Fitzgerald's brilliant novel, The Great Gatsby' As if everyone needed to be told who Jay Gatsby was, and as if everyone needed to be told that the book was one of the greatest novels ever written. As if, Terry thought, we're all just a bunch of dumb kids, waiting to be educated by our betters. There was nothing by Skip Jones in The Paper. For Terry, there was always something missing when Skip's by-line wasn't in there. He was happy that Skip was on the mend. But The Paper seemed almost ordinary without him.
'His large hands were too powerful to resist,' Misty giggled. 'His mouth fastened on her rosebud lips like a vice.' She looked up at Terry. 'Now how can lips possibly be like a vice, you silly cow?' She shrugged. 'Oh well… She felt his desire rise up inside her -that's a bit of a Freudian slip, his desire rising up inside her - then suddenly he swept her up in his rope-like muscles and carried her to the waiting four-poster. "Damn you, Valerie!" he cried hoarsely. "Why should we wait another year?" And she knew in her beating heart that her reticence was only inflaming him still further.'
The real reason Terry felt a little blue today was because for the first time he could see an end to the whole music thing. He thought it was changing. But it was more than that. It was dying.
One of his best friends had been kicked out, and the other one seemed suddenly to have a proper job, his future set in stone, the career of an adult. They had sent Ray off to New York to talk to Springsteen. His comeback was complete.
But for Terry this life was coming to its natural end - as if it was really just his version of going to university, or doing national service. A few years and you were out. You went in a boy and you came out a man. All grown up. Or at least on your way to being grown up.
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You turned around and the bands were new, and a bit younger than you, and you didn't like them quite as much as the bands you kicked around with at the start, the bands who were now struggling to record their second albums, or trying to crack America, or arguing among themselves, or overdoing the drugs. Suddenly, just to seem interested, you had to fake it a bit.
And the faces in the clubs and at the gigs were changing too. Now every night he went out he was aware that he no longer knew everyone in the house. The familiar faces were thinning out.
The day after the Western World disaster, Billy Blitzen had gone back to New York, deported by the Home Office for not having the correct work permit. Legend had it that Billy went home to Brooklyn with his guitar full of Iranian heroin, which he sold at a rock-bottom price to his kid brother, who had never even smoked a spliff before. Terry had no way of knowing it as he sat on that train with Misty, but Billy was just a few years away from a date with a disease that none of them had heard of yet.
And whatever happened to all the other boys and girls that Terry had known back in the summer of 1976? Where had they all gone? To drugs and nervous breakdowns? To marriage and babies? To real jobs and early nights? He would never know.
He knew he would miss the good stuff. He would miss coming down the stairs of some club into a world of noise, his spirits lifting with the music and the speed, the feeling of sweat inside his Oxfam jacket, and the overwhelming sensation of being a part of it all. But he couldn't kid himself. The life he had known was drawing to an end.
He tried to remember what Skip had said. He knew it was something about all art forms having their day. Like jazz had its day. Like painting had its day. Skip had said that there would probably never be another Miles Davis, and there would never be another Picasso. Skip had said that the music would never again be quite as good as the music they had loved, and so you were left with just another dying art form, and soon it would be ready for the museum.
But if their music was dying, wouldn't they die with it? It had been the heart of their world for as long as Terry could remember. Their music was more than a soundtrack - it was a life-support machine from childhood through adolescence and into what was passing for maturity. Perhaps they were all going to have to find other things to live for, and the music would be just something they came back to now and again, like the memory of someone you had lost.
As he waited for the train to leave the station, Terry felt lucky that he had a woman he loved, a baby on the way, and a little family of his own. Things would be easier after the wedding, wouldn't they?
'She felt the love she had for him burning inside her. He was all she wanted and all she would ever need. Her young body trembled with a thrill that felt one step from sin. Soon she would be his wife and be his forever.'
Terry walked down to the dining car to look for tea and bacon sandwiches. By the time he came back empty-handed, Misty had put down her book and was staring thoughtfully out of the window.
'They're on strike,' Terry said. 'This bloody country. Somebody should do something.'
But she wasn't listening. She didn't care about bacon sandwiches and strikes on British Rail.
'What do you think is better?' she said. 'To never change - to be the same person you always were as a kid - or to grow out of all that stuff and grow old gracefully?'
'We'll never be old,' Terry smiled. 'They'll have invented a cure for it by the time we get there.'
She stuffed Doris Hardman into her bag, and then paused when she caught a glimpse of something. She pulled out her pair of pink fake mink handcuffs. 'Remember these?' she said, as if they would bring the fond
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memories flooding back. But all Terry remembered were silly games where he didn't know the rules.
He watched her snap one of the pink fake mink cuffs around her wrist and admire it, as if it were the finest bracelet in the window of Ratner's. Then, with one of those aren't-I-a-naughty-thing? looks on her face, she reached across the table separating them and snapped the other cuff around Terry's wrist. T remember,' Terry said.