Chinaski Page 7

  7

  So, apparently, Carl was in a band – she’d never heard anything about it. Normally anyone in Deep Focus’s orbit who even thought about starting a band would raise the idea of recording with the label first, just to hedge their bets; but even Freida hadn’t known. Carl, ubiquitous and obliging, was nevertheless secretive. Sometimes he would disappear for a day, coming back with a new and jarring item of clothing – once an ancient Bowie t-shirt, once a fur trapper’s hat. One day Lydia saw him driving the Deep Focus van through the city centre with two obviously drunk, obviously homeless people lolling on the front seats. Since he always arrived at the offices alone and never mentioned any friends, it was easy for Lydia to assume that he had just washed up on her shore, his past wiped clean. But this wasn’t true.

  Carl had mentioned his band casually to Ian, who told Lydia. “I asked if he’d be able to help me sort those t-shirts this evening, and he said he had a rehearsal. I said rehearsal of what, and he said it was his band. He said it like that, His band. Did you know about this?” – Lydia offered a non committal shift of posture – “Because I’d happily find some time at the rehearsal space for him, I told him but I’m not sure he heard me. Can you let him know?”

  Asking Carl anything always made Lydia nervous, because it forced her to remember that there were still private pieces of him that were beyond her reach, pieces that belonged to an unknown past. He could also be prickly and, worse, distant if he felt cornered. So it was a surprise when he not only admitted to being in a band (and Ian was right, he referred to it as his band, only his band), but offered to introduce her to the rest of them and let her watch the rehearsal.

  They arrived in an affluent suburb in the west of the city. Mock Tudor mansions sat side by side, a respectful distance between them, each with their own tasteful barrier against the outside world – wrought iron fencing, privets, and faux rustic walls. They stopped outside the last house on the left – this one slightly smaller than its neighbours, but still as large as the comfortable home in which Lydia had been raised, in an equally affluent eastern suburb.

  Carl led her round the side of the house, down an iron staircase to a basement that was an adolescent boy’s dream. A collage of posters, flyers, headlines ripped from newspapers, marker pen banter covered the main wall. A drum set was against the back flanked with two guitars on stands. An old sofa sagged below the small window facing a mute TV, and nestled in its springs was a gnome-like man with tattoos on his face. Lydia recognised him as one of the homeless people she’d seen in the van with Carl that time. The man tapped the ash from his roll up shakily into an empty beer can and nodded at her impassively.

  Carl was full of nervous energy. He didn’t make introductions, acting as if she must already know the man on the sofa – who later identified himself as Dom, offering her a solemn handshake. Carl made her tea and forgot to take the bag out of the cup; he put some music on – a tinny, badly produced demo on a cheap cassette. He rolled new cigarettes before finishing the one he already had lit, and Lydia began to feel uncomfortable. Had he taken his pills? Should she stop him opening another beer? No-one had spoken for a while now and the silence was only broken by Dom sniggering at something on the silenced TV. Lydia, uncharacteristically unsure of herself, was wondering what to do when a large boy in a rugby top and the beginnings of a beard walked heavily down the stairs into the room. He carried a record bag, and when he saw Carl and Lydia he grinned happily, shyly.

  “Mate!” to Carl. And, “I think I know you from school – Catherine?”

  Lydia, trying to ignore Carl’s startled look, answered, “It was Catherine, but I’m called Lydia nowadays.”

  Peter looked blank, then, smiling understanding, “Oh OK. Lydia’s a great name!” and Lydia smiled back despite her disquiet.

  She didn’t remember this boy from school. He would have been a couple of years below her anyway. But it was slightly alarming that he remembered her because how she was at school ran counter to her carefully crafted image now. As Catherine Hunt, she had been a school prefect, a hockey player and was heavily involved in the theatre club. She associated only with the richest and most confident girls – the princesses with ponies, expensive orthodontics, well preserved mothers and high powered dads. This was a necessarily tiny elite and other girls in this prosperous and sought after school, those who didn’t make the cut to join Lydia’s set, tasted a disenfranchisement that they were never to experience in later life. Those girls, middle-class though they were, were not upper middle-class, and the pain of knowing that they were not quite good enough led some of them to rebel against the elite that rejected them. One autumn term for example, there had been a campaign against Lydia, almost an insurrection. Nasty rhymes were written in lipstick on the walls of the girls’ toilets. Someone had viciously slashed at her sports bag. And then, on a poster appealing for volunteers to help out with the school Christmas play (which Lydia was directing), the H of her surname and all of Catherine apart from the C was carefully tippexed out. It was the only time in her life so far that Lydia had been hurt and confused. It crossed her mind that if this could happen here in school, where she was queen, then it could happen anywhere. She decided to mitigate the chance of her name being used as ammunition in the future by swapping her first name for her middle one.

  There was a lot of waiting about. Carl withdrew to a corner, tuning the already tuned guitars, and his energy seemed to have deserted him. Peter kept disappearing up the stairs and then coming back with more and more equipment. Dom stayed pinned to the back pillows of the sofa, his eyes screwed shut now.

  “We’re auditioning bassists today,” Peter told her. “Carl met some guy at Deep Focus, and we have someone coming over who saw the advert at DiscKings. I think there’s someone else. Dom’s here to help out. So are you going to give us your opinion? You know your stuff.”

  Peter seemed very interested in Lydia, almost in awe of her, and kept asking her questions. It was quite flattering. Yes, she’d been promoting for a couple of years now. Yes she knew Ian and Freida very well; when they need help, a second opinion on things, they know where to come.

  “Well, you’ll be very useful to us then – we really need to get things off the ground now. Me and Carl have been doing this for ages now, but we always have trouble with bassists.”

  “That’s ’cause most bassists are cunts,” intoned Dom from the sofa, his eyes still shut.

  “Cunts,” Peter agreed, blushing.

  The first cunt arrived a minute later. Chubby, on the wrong side of twenty five, and squeezed into scuffed leather. Lydia had seen him around the Deep Focus office mostly sitting on the back steps smoking weed when he should have been working. He mimicked the bassline from War Pigs and his features screwed themselves up into a repellent orgasmic expression. The second one never showed up and third guy was a slight, taciturn youth in clogs that Carl had got talking to in a record shop. He played a reasonable, remorseless bass. Carl murmured to Dom, who nodded. It was decided that the new guy – John – would stay, listen to the first track of the demo and try to play along with Peter and Carl. The tinny demo was played and played again. Carl duplicated odd whiny scraps on his guitar, John made a good fist of copying the unimaginative basslines, while Peter pounded away at his drum kit with remarkable aggression. Then they would suddenly stop and huddle together, muttering to each other. Carl would peer at Dom for a yes or no. There were more yes’s than no’s, along with cryptic comments:

  “A bit Crimson,” was one; and, “if you don’t pull it together it gets pushed out,” was another.

  Carl nodded sagely, his face a blank, and Peter turned to Lydia with pain in his eyes. Eventually, when they took a break, Dom went to buy some more beers, and Carl and John edged into a corner talking guitars, he tapped Lydia’s elbow, “What do you think?”

  Lydia hedged, “I’m still surprised that Carl has a band, I mean he hadn’t told anyone.”

  “Yeah,” Peter was rueful, “Carl’s
like that. But I was so keen on getting you down here, you’ve been around, you know about music. I really, really wanted to get your opinion. If it was up to Carl we’d never record anything, probably. Just rehearse the whole time like we’ve been doing since school. He has Dom come over because he trusts his opinion, but I never understand what he says. Do you? So I told him, ‘Get your girlfriend down here, you’re always saying she knows what she’s talking about, let’s get her opinion.’ I mean I need to know if I should apply for university or not, if it’s worth staying with the music.”

  Lydia was caught between being offended that it had been Peter who’d invited her and not Carl, and being flattered that Carl was proud of her.

  “I think what you’re doing is OK,” she began carefully, “but I’d need to hear more. A better demo definitely. And I haven’t heard the vocals, do you have a singer yet?”

  “Oh that’s Carl.”

  Lydia didn’t have time to hide her surprise. She blurted, “Carl? But he doesn’t even talk much...I really can’t imagine...he’s so shy.”

  “Oh, he changes when he’s singing. Really. It’s really surprising, to people who know him. If I’m honest, I think that’s the thing we have going for us, the vocals.”

  “Why hasn’t he sung today?”

  “With you here? It took me a month to get him to invite you.”

  That stung, but she made a quick decision, “Let me ask Ian if you can use their space to do a decent demo, that’ll give me a better idea of where you are. And Freida would like to hear too, I bet.”

  Without realising it, her voice had raised. Carl stood frozen with his mouth open. His hands shook a little and his head bobbed slightly one two three. For a second Lydia thought he was having a fit, then realised that he was nodding, he was happy, and that he was frightened.

  On the way back in the van Lydia talked. She’d been dying to give her real opinion for hours, but the lugubrious presence of Dom, and John’s obvious nerves, had prevented her. She managed to keep quiet until they’d dropped off Dom at an urgently described corner – “the one where Angie was then...that one...near the green door. That time. YOU know” – and as soon as the door slammed shut she began.

  From what she’d heard they sounded too much like two other bands on Deep Focus. They had to work on that. Peter’s clothes need urgent attention – nobody should wear rugby shirts. And those baggy jeans! Carl, too, would need to invest in a whole new wardrobe, and she’d help with that. If the new bassist could be dissuaded from staggering about like a drunk then that would be for the best. All eyes really ought to be on Carl. And she really had to hear his vocals so they could work on them together before talking to Freida and Ian. At this Carl smiled.

  But Lydia never did hear him sing just to her. The next day she swung into Deep Focus, and finding nobody in, left a note on Ian’s desk: ‘It’s close to home, but I have a potential new signing for you. Can I have studio space sometime next week? Trust me, this might work.’ Then she went back to her parents’ to do her laundry and stayed overnight. By the time she came back, she had a nearly formed script in her head about introducing Carl’s band to the label. In the last two days she had convinced herself that Chinaski not only had potential, but great potential. True, she hadn’t heard the vocals yet, but vocalists didn’t have to be good singers, just charismatic images with lung power, and even lung power could be taught. She allowed herself a pleasing imaginative montage: listening to the vocals and sensing something – a glimmer of greatness; a strenuous series of vocal exercises; a comedic series of styling sessions – Carl (and she supposed Peter and John as well, though they weren’t as appealing to imagine) stepping out of changing rooms wearing various outfits running from the fey to the ridiculous. The final outfit (somewhat fuzzy in her mind) perfectly complementing his beauty, his otherness. And finally, the stage performance – or rather the backstage aftermath; the awe, the surprise – mousy little Carl coming good, and Lydia gathering praise, congratulations, envy.

  After a while, waiting in the office by herself though, she became restless. She got up to find people, and almost ran into Freida in the doorway, along with Ian, Peter and the studio engineer, Mason, all looking excited. Ian was gleeful, holding Mason’s elbow and demanding, “Who knew? Who fucking knew?” while the usually impassive Mason allowed himself to raise an eyebrow, crack a grin. And trailing at the back, his hair in his eyes, smiling a dazed smile at everything and nothing, was Carl.

  They all tumbled into the office. Carl was wearing clothes she hadn’t seen before – nothing outlandish or peculiar, but new, almost self consciously new. Normally he’d wear an oversized t-shirt, more like a robe, its sleeves reaching to his elbows with the ever patched jeans gone baggy at the crotch. Today, someone had given him (because he surely wouldn’t have thought about doing it himself) a t-shirt that fitted his chest and clung slightly to his biceps. His jeans were slim, clinging, with artful holes at the knees. He had washed his hair and it looked lighter for it. It almost looked bleached. Lydia felt a wave of jealousy – something she’d never, ever in her life felt before. She hated the person who’d given him these clothes, whoever it was who’d arranged this without her, excluding her. She hated the person who’d taken her beautiful montage and re-edited it to make themselves the star.

  Carl got ill after that, and she’d had to take him away. He needed her so much. For days in her room she’d coached him, encouraged him, fed him his pills and begged him to call Freida and Ian. “It’s what you’ve dreamed of,” she told him. “It’s what you need. Don’t you want to see what you can become?” And finally, finally, he’d gone back to the studio but wouldn’t be parted from her, couldn’t function without her. He owed it all to her, really. He owed everything to her.

  8

  Peter

  After calling Lydia, Peter drifted around the city; a sentimental journey. First past the shop where Carl bought single cigarettes after school. He remembered standing guard outside here one drunken night, waiting for Carl to finish forcing the back window; he’d come back with bloodied knuckles and two dented cans of Stella.

  For a while he sat next to the canal – on the bench where he and Carl had sat every Monday, pooling their money until they had enough for a much discussed and coveted record. They had agreed that any purchase should always be kept at Peter’s house, because it would be safer there. Peter, of course, had a generous enough allowance from his parents that he could have bought an album a week on his own if he’d wanted to. But he’d kept this from Carl, telling himself that he didn’t want him to feel poor and different, but of course, deep down, it was Peter who didn’t want to feel different. Carl was always, effortlessly, cooler; and if playing poverty allowed some of that to rub off on Peter, well, there was no harm in that. Later on, when Carl had disappeared from school, and no-one seemed to know where he was (although there were rumours), Peter would listen to their shared record collection alone. He never knew until later where his best friend had gone for those two years, and to this day he didn’t know why Carl hadn’t let him know, hadn’t stayed in touch. It made him angry at the time, hurt. He still felt hurt, when he thought about it.

  The whole school knew Carl’s backstory within days of him appearing at assembly that Monday morning. An army kid, six or seven schools, divorced parents, living with his nan. In this staunchly dull, middle-class school, any sniff of difference was intoxicating, and Carl, with his tangled long hair, his open, flower-like face, the obviously second hand uniform, well, he was famous right from the start, in large part because he really didn’t seem to care about or notice other people. There were no finger holds on him; bullies had no traction. He didn’t even need to speak to anyone at break time. Girls, even those who never normally spoke to each other, formed dense packs of distanced lust. Boys, even the hard ones who lived on the estate next to the park, gravitated towards him and held a respectful orbit, sometimes nonchalantly moving forward, asking a question, nodding to him in the lunc
h queue.

  Carl had free school lunches. Normally this would make a kid a pariah. Even the poorest kids hid their shame by bringing in a lunch box, but Carl didn’t seem to care or notice, and so he got away with it. In the second week Peter had come across Carl and Darren King smoking in the toilets. Smoking Darren’s cigarettes. Darren-King-Of-The-Psychos. The only kid in school who was universally deemed a ‘problem child’. Darren, whose violent whim could annihilate a kid’s chance of ever feeling safe again. Carl, a practised smoker with the orange finger to prove it, was just taking his cigarettes, not asking, not saying thanks, and Darren was smiling at him with something like anxious hunger in his face.

  After that, Peter began to notice more weird things about the new kid. His homework was one. He’d hand in reams of it, or nothing at all. They were in English class together, and whenever menopausal Ms Clancey asked Carl to read from the text, he would refuse in a blurry mutter that would have antagonised her if anyone else did it, but not Carl. Instead she would pass on the duty to Peter, who sat just behind. Similarly Carl didn’t get into trouble when he had obviously not done the homework. Sometimes Peter would linger, hoping to leave at the same time as Carl, maybe speak to him, but he never succeeded. Carl was always the last to leave, always spending time at the end haltingly answering questions in his indistinct way, listening quietly to Ms Clancey and drawing from his bag sheaves of paper. Or nothing at all.

  Perhaps Peter noticed and concentrated on the new boy because his own way of life had recently been derailed. At the start of the year, he began to get headaches, migraines really. His vision crumbled into black at the corners, his lids weakened and trembled, and the pain would start. At their worst, the headaches lasted a day or more, and came with shakes and weakness, rolling in like a tornado, gathering nausea along the way. His father took him to every specialist he could find. His mother worried that he’d inherited her weak eyesight, and took him to specialists of her own, but they all came to the same conclusion: the headaches were severe, and inconvenient, but not serious or disabling enough to be worrying, and he would probably grow out of them. In the meantime sports were out, TV was to be kept to a minimum, and he had to carry his medication around with him all the time – a red pill at the first rumblings of pain; a yellow pill if and when it got worse. After three weeks off school he came back ten pounds lighter. He couldn’t rejoin the rugby team and his parents had made a special request that he be allowed to stay indoors during breaks in case strong sunlight and jostling boys brought on an attack. In the space of two months, he went from popular athlete, to the kind of boy girls feel sorry for.