‘What does he want to use it for himself?’
Chester shrugged. ‘Search me.’
‘Doesn’t anyone ever see him?’
‘Nope.’ He looked up at the window again. ‘Listen to that bloody racket. I don’t know how the neighbours put up with it.’
Incredibly loud music was issuing from behind the barely lit window. A wail and swirl of saxes and synths and this drum machine pounding out some robotic backbeat. The noise in the adjoining houses must have been unbearable.
Chester went up to the front door, which was falling off its hinges, and began pounding on it with both fists.
‘You have to do this,’ he said, ‘or they won’t hear you.’
While we were waiting for someone to answer, I mentioned a matter which had been worrying me.
‘Look, Chester, if I decide to join this band, then The Alaska Factory — you know, they’ll fold up. I won’t have time to play with them, too, and I don’t think they could carry on without me.’
‘Yes, I know. That’s all right.’
‘But we’re your only two acts. It’ll halve your income.’
‘I’ve got other money coming in. Besides, what am I making out of you at the moment? Two gigs a week, at ten per cent of fifty quid a time? I’ve told you before, there’s no money in live music, it’s all in the record deal and you boys are never going to get a record deal. Are you? I mean, when did you ever make a decent demo?’
I fingered the tape in my pocket — the one we had made only last week, the one we had made for Madeline. But all I said was: ‘So?’
‘Whereas this lot, you know, they’ve got potential. They’ve got image. They’re young.’ He went back down the steps into the street, and looked up at the window. ‘This is bloody ridiculous. Oy!’
Cupping his hands and shouting did no good either. Finally a handful of pebbles thrown hard at the window brought a puzzled pale face, with long red hair dangling over the sill. He smiled when he saw Chester.
‘Hi!’
‘Are you going to let us in, or aren’t you?’
‘I’m sorry, Chess. We can’t hear much, with the music.’
‘Well hurry up, will you? It’s freezing out here.’
In fact I think I was the colder of the two, in my thin old raincoat, whereas Chester, as usual, looked impeccable: fur-lined gloves, leather jacket, cloth cap, with those steely round eyes and stocky figure which seemed ready to take on anyone. He tutted to me and rubbed his hands together briskly. Then the door was yanked open, at last, by someone I recognized: it was Paisley — taller, more angular, more sallow even than I had remembered him.
‘Hi, Chess,’ he said. ‘Come in.’
‘About time too,’ said Chester, as we stepped inside. ‘Paisley, this is Bill.’
‘Hi.’ He shook my hand coldly.
‘We’ve already met,’ I said. Chester coughed, and Paisley looked puzzled, so I added: ‘Briefly, down at the Goat. Remember?’
‘No,’ said Paisley. ‘Sorry.’
We picked our way down a dark corridor, past a rusty bed frame standing against a wall, and several black bin liners from which rubbish was overflowing on to the floor.
‘Watch out for the holes,’ said Paisley, as he led us up the staircase. Two of the stairs were missing.
Chester turned to me and whispered: ‘Is it all right to introduce you as Bill?’
‘I prefer William,’ I said. ‘It’s… well, it’s not so short.’
‘OK.’
I paused at the first landing. A window pane had been smashed and broken glass was still scattered over the floorboards. Already the music from upstairs was getting oppressively loud and a curious filthy smell had begun to infect the air, so I put my head out of the empty window frame for a little while, looking at the tidy back gardens of the other houses. Chester went on ahead, while Paisley waited for me further up the stairs.
‘You coming up?’
On the second floor, the mystery of the luminous glow was solved. Paisley led me into a large room — two rooms knocked together, in fact, running the length of the house. There were no carpets, no curtains, no furniture at all except for a huge dining-table and six or seven wooden chairs. On the mantelpiece in the back half of the room was the only source of light: a long phosphorescent tube, obviously pinched from the strip lighting of some office or tube station or something. It gave off a ghostly sheen, scarcely touching the shadows in the corners of the room but throwing into unearthly relief the faces of the four people sitting around the table: three men and a woman. They were eating a massive takeaway meaclass="underline" tin cartons, paper buckets and bits of old newspaper littered the table and the immediate floor area, which led me to believe that the meal was a compound of Chinese, Kentucky Fried and fish and chips. The air was thick with the smell of stale dope. There was an electric cooker in one corner; all four rings were on, which seemed to be a way of providing heat as well as making it easy to light up. My arrival had no impact. They went on drinking and smoking as if I wasn’t there.
In the front half of the room, nearest the street, was the stereo system. Not a domestic hi-fi, but a huge disco console with twin turntables, mixing desk and 200-watt speakers. The noise of that maniacal, volcanic music was deafening. I put my fingers to my ears and Chester, noticing this, tactfully turned it down a little before announcing to the room in generaclass="underline" ‘OK everyone, this is William. William’s going to be your new keyboard player, right. William — meet The Unfortunates.’
There was a muted grunt from one or two of the eaters. The woman looked my way. That was it.
‘Hi,’ I said nervously. ‘Nice place you’ve got here.’
This produced a short outburst of mirthless laughter.
‘Yeah, it’s got character, hasn’t it?’ somebody said.
‘Sometimes you can smell the character of this place half-way down the street.’
I decided to try another subject.
‘Is this one of your tapes?’ I asked.
‘What, this music? No. It’s too tuneful for us, this is. We used to sound like this, when we were trying to be commercial.’
Chester switched it off.
‘Here, I’ll put one of their tapes on,’ he said.
What I heard was disconcerting, but if you listened closely, there was a kind of sense behind it. The rhythm section was loud, fast and minimal, while the two guitarists — one using some sort of fuzz box, the other playing strange funk patterns high up the neck — seemed to be playing songs all of their own. Meanwhile, Paisley’s voice was jack-knifing all over the place, from the top to the bottom of the register:
Death is life
Death is life
And black is the colour of the human heart
Death is life
Death is life
You have to die before you can live
You have to kill before you can love
‘Nice lyrics,’ I said to Paisley, when it came to an end. ‘Did you write them?’
‘Yeah. You think so? I don’t like them. Too soppy.’
‘Yeah, you want to… darken them up a bit,’ said someone at the table. ‘We don’t want to start sounding too friendly.’
‘We don’t sound too friendly, do we?’ Paisley asked me.
‘It’s not your main problem.’
‘You think you could do something with that?’ Chester asked. ‘Put some keyboards in, I mean?’
‘Yes, sure.’
‘Something with a bit of bite, I mean. No strings or anything. We don’t want it to sound like Mantovani, you know what I mean?’
‘I think so. Listen, Chester — ’ I felt in my pocket, and my fingers closed on the tape. ‘I’ve brought something of my own along: that tape we made, last week? I know you haven’t heard it yet, but — well, I think it’s really good. Can I put it on? Give everyone an idea of the kind of thing I do.’