Stories We Could Tell

Leon slipped his hand into his leather jacket and felt for his key, glancing over his shoulder before he began negotiating his way across the planks. He had been in the squat for over a year now, ever since he had dropped out of the LSE and started full time on The Paper, but there was still a taste of fear in his mouth whenever he came back. You never knew when the bailiffs and cops would be coming. You never knew what was waiting for you.

As soon as he was inside the hallway a hairy unwashed face appeared at the top of the stairs, as Leon knew it would, as it always did. It wasn’t just Leon. There was a creeping paranoia about squat life that never really went away. It seemed strangely familiar to Leon, because he thought it was not so different to the suspicion lurking behind the net curtains of the rich suburb where he had grown up.

‘Someone’s waiting for you,’ said the hairy face at the top of the stairs.

Leon was amazed. Nobody was ever waiting for him.

‘Some straight,’ said the hairy guy. ‘Reckons he’s your father.’

I knew it, Leon thought, his stomach sinking. I knew something bad was going to happen.

‘The French guys don’t like it,’ said the face at the top of the stairs. ‘We nearly didn’t let him in.’

‘You shouldn’t have,’ Leon said, trying to keep his voice calm, trying to pretend he was in control. He began climbing the stairs.

The squat was meant to be some kind of democracy, but in reality it was run by the French and Germans, who were older, who had been doing this for years, who talked about adventures in places like Paris and Amsterdam with such authority that Leon always fell silent, and felt like a kid who had seen nothing of the world. Leon was furious that his father should embarrass him in front of these great men.

At the top of the stairs he heard the usual babble of languages and sounds. The floorboards of the squat were bare and everything echoed and seemed louder than it should have. The Grateful Dead, turned up to ten, an argument about the murder of Leon Trotsky, another argument about a borrowed bottle of milk, and a woman’s voice, apparently soothing a baby.

Leon wondered what his father would make of the overwhelming smell, for the squat was full of ripe scents, the trapped air behind the boarded-up windows reeking of dry rot, unwashed clothes, joss sticks and, seeping into everything, the odour of the vegetable soup that was permanently simmering on a big black stove.

The old man. Fuck it. Leon swallowed hard. When would it ever end? That fear of facing his father? That terror of seeing the disappointment in his eyes?

He was by the sash window, his hands behind his back like the Duke of Edinburgh about to inspect the guard, staring down at the street. He was a tall, good-looking man seven days from his fifty-third birthday, calm and regal in his crisp Humphrey Bogart raincoat. He was standing. There was nowhere to sit down. There was nothing in the room but a pile of rucksacks and a few sleeping bags, one of which contained two sleeping teenage girls, curled up like kittens.

‘What are you doing here, Dad?’

The old man turned to him.

‘Hello, Leon,’ he said, as if he could hardly believe their luck at bumping into each other. ‘I could ask you the same question, couldn’t I?’

The old man seemed perfectly relaxed. Leon had to hand it to him – how many of the boys he went to school with had fathers who could walk into a squat and not bat an eyelid? Leon remembered what his father had said to him when he was a boy, and delirious with excitement because his daddy had taken him to his newspaper office as a special treat during the long summer holiday. A journalist has to be at home everywhere, Leon. Remember that.

The old man smiled, and placed a hand on Leon’s shoulder, patting it twice, and then let it fall away when his son did not respond.

‘Good to see you. Are you keeping well?’

He looked up at Leon’s hat but said nothing. Leon’s parents had always been very understanding about the vagaries of fashion. Infuriatingly tolerant, in fact. None of his haircuts – the botched Ziggy Stardust, the failed Rod Stewart – had ever troubled them. That’s their problem exactly, Leon thought. They can understand a bit of youthful rebellion. But they can’t stomach the real thing.

Leon grimaced. ‘You really should have rung. This is not a good time. I’m going out – my friends will be waiting – at the Western World.’

His father frowned, lifting a hand to Leon’s bruised cheekbone, but not quite touching it. ‘What on earth happened to your poor face?’

Leon wanted to say – oh, please don’t fuss, I’ve had twenty years of it. But he couldn’t resist – he wanted his father to know. He wanted his father to be proud of him. And when the fuck would that ever end?

‘I was down there on Saturday. You know – Lewisham.’

Leon relished the frightened look in the old man’s face.

‘The riot? What – they beat you?’

Leon laughed at that. ‘I just got clipped. A cop’s knee.’

His father was wide-eyed. Everything amazed him. ‘His knee?’

Leon sighed with irritation. How could anyone know so little? ‘He was on a horse, Dad. He was a cop on a horse.’ Leon waited. He wanted some acknowledgement from his father. A bit of credit, that wouldn’t have gone amiss. Some small nod of recognition that Leon had done a good thing by going to Lewisham and standing up to the racists. But the old man just exhaled with frustration.

‘Why do you want to get mixed up in all that? A bunch of bower boys waving the flag, and another bunch of bower boys throwing bricks at them. What does that solve?’

Leon’s face reddened with anger. ‘You should understand. You of all people. They’re Fascists, Dad. They have to be stopped. Isn’t that what you did in the war?’

The old man raised his eyebrows. He almost smiled, and Leon blushed. He wished he could stop doing that.

‘Is that what you think it was like at Monte Cassino? A punch-up on Lewisham High Street? What a lot you have to learn, my boy.’

This is why I left home, Leon thought, his eyes pricking with tears. The constant belittling. The just-not-fucking-getting-it. The never being good enough. The being told that I know nothing.

‘I don’t care what you think,’ Leon said, knowing he cared desperately. ‘And why did you come? Why?’

‘Your mother asked me to,’ said the old man, and Leon felt that twinge of hurt. So it wasn’t his dad that was worried about him. It was her. His mother. ‘Your mother doesn’t get it. All your advantages and you end up living with a bunch of dossers.’

‘Listen to you,’ Leon said, mocking him now. ‘The great enlightened liberal – sneering at the homeless.’

‘I’m not sneering. I’m just – I’m just happy to see you.’

‘Can you keep your voice down, please?’ Leon said, indicating the sleeping girls, trying to show the old man that he was on his territory now. ‘They’ve been up all night.’

His father peered at the girls as if noticing them for the first time.

‘Who are they?’ he said, keeping his voice down. There was a natural curiosity about him, and Leon thought perhaps that was why he was such a good journalist.

‘Someone found them sleeping in the photo booth at Euston. They’ve come down from Glasgow.’

He wanted his dad to understand. He wanted him to see that these were Leon’s battles – fighting racism, finding a roof for the homeless, confronting injustice – and they were just as important as the battles that his father had fought.

But the old man just shook his head sadly, as if it was insane for children to be sleeping in photo booths, and it infuriated Leon.

‘Dad, do you know what happens to most of the homeless kids who sleep in railway stations? They end up selling their bodies within a week.’

‘They might be homeless, but you’re not, are you, Leon?’ He looked from the sleeping girls to his son. ‘You’re just playing at it.’

Leon was having trouble controlling his heart, his breathing, his temper. He was at that point in a young man’s life when every word from his father’s mouth enraged him.

‘I’m playing at nothing,’ Leon said. ‘They can’t leave good housing empty. We’re not going to stand for it any more. The homeless are fighting back.’

‘But you choose to be homeless, Leon. Where’s the sense in that? You give up your home for a slum. You give up your education for some music paper.’

Here we go, Leon thought. As if writing think pieces about the cod war is morally superior. As if sitting on your fanny and getting a degree somehow validates your existence.

‘I’ve got a friend called Terry. His parents think he’s done very well for himself by getting a job on a music paper.’

‘I am sure Terry didn’t have your advantages. I’m sure Terry wasn’t at the London School of Economics until he dropped out in his first year. How can you throw all that away? Your grandfather was a taxi driver from Hackney. Do you know what he would have given for the chances you’ve had?’

The taxi driver from Hackney, Leon thought. It always came back to my father’s father. The old man didn’t know how fucking lucky he was – all he had to compete with was a taxi driver from Hackney who never quite lost his Polish accent. And what did Leon have to compete with? Leon had to compete with him.

One of the girls in the sleeping bag stirred, opened her eyes and went back to sleep.

‘You shouldn’t have come here, Dad,’ Leon said.

‘I came because your mother’s frantic,’ the old man said, and Leon flinched at the feeling in his voice. ‘She’s worried sick. Where’s your compassion for her, Leon?’ His father looked around wildly. ‘You think whoever owns this place is going to let this last for ever? One night soon someone is going to kick you out – and kick you bloody hard, my son.’

Leon narrowed his eyes. ‘We’ll be ready for them.’

His father threw his hands in the air. Leon had seen that exasperated gesture so many times. It said the things I have to put up with!

‘Oh, grow up, Leon. You think these people are going to change the world? Take a good whiff. They have trouble changing their socks.’

‘They’re committed to something bigger than themselves. They care.’

‘They carel his father echoed. ‘One day you’ll see that the people who care, the people who profess love for the masses, are the most heartless bastards in the world.’ Then his voice was almost begging. ‘Look – I was like you. Thought I knew it all. You’ve got so much time, Leon. You don’t realise how much time you have.’

Round and round. Never ending. It had been just like this in the last days of home, Leon thought. Bossing him around, dressing it up as reasoned debate. Until one of them – always Leon, now he thought about it – slammed away from the dinner table and went to his room. But he wasn’t living at home any more. His father did not understand. That was all over.

‘You just want me to be what I was, Dad – a good little student you can boast about to all your friends.’

His father shook his head, and Leon felt a flicker of fear – he looked like he was in some kind of pain. ‘No – I just want you to have a happy life. Dropping out – that’s not the way, that can never be the way.’

Happiness! Now Leon had heard everything.

‘Life’s not just about happiness, is it? I can’t go back to my old life, Dad. I can’t sit around with a bunch of privileged middle-class kids when there are people sleeping on the street, when there are racists beating up Pakistani shopkeepers, when they are marching through the streets making their Nazi salutes. I can’t pretend it’s not happening.’

‘Come home,’ his father said.

That’s what it came down to in the end. Never hearing a word he said. Wanting things to be the way they were, when they could never be that way again.

Leon shrugged. ‘I am home.’

‘Oh, you stupid little boy,’ his father said, and Leon was shocked to see him filling up with tears, turning his face away, staring out the window at nothing.

Leon couldn’t stand it. He couldn’t stand to see the old man so upset. He felt like putting his arms around him, but just as he was about to do so a couple of the French guys appeared in the doorway and stood there with their arms folded, making it clear that this man was unwanted in this place.

Leon’s father felt their presence, glanced at them waiting in the doorway and nodded, as if he understood.

The old man hugged him and pulled away quickly. Leon felt like patting him, or saying something to reassure him, or telling him it had to be this way, but he didn’t know where to start.

Leon walked his father to the door in silence. They shook hands, as formal as strangers who had not really had a chance to talk, and Leon watched the old man turn up the collar of his Humphrey Bogart raincoat and carefully cross the muddy moat.

You were meant to keep the front door shut and locked, but Leon watched his dad as he walked down the boarded-up street, and he kept watching until he had disappeared round the corner, and by then all the anger had faded to this sort of flat, empty sorrow. Leon couldn’t see a reason why they would ever meet again.

He closed the door of the squat and began setting all the locks.

The office emptied and the big white clock by the reception desk seemed to get louder by the minute. But still Ray tarried at his desk, fretting over the damaged tape recorder, huddled over it, trying to straighten the deformed spool.

Pressing start. Watching the thing wobble. Straightening it with his thumb. Pressing stop. Pressing with his thumb again – pressing harder this time…and then the spool snapped.

It came away with a crisp, sickening sound and flew across the room. Ray gasped with shock, staring at the jagged black stump that was left behind. Bad, this is so bad. So much for tracking down John Lennon, Ray thought. I never even made it out of the office. Pathetic. I deserve to be given the boot.

His friends were gone now and Ray ached for their presence – for someone, anyone, to tell him what to do next. He stared helplessly at the useless tape machine and he realised that he knew this feeling. This feeling of being completely and totally alone.

He was eleven years old and standing in front of a classroom full of children who had already had time to make friends, form alliances and learn how to grin knowingly when they saw a new kid who was trying not to cry.

Too late. Always too late.

It was easy for his two brothers. John was four years older, tough, athletic, afraid of nothing. And his younger brother, Robbie, was only five and just starting school. He wouldn’t know anything but this strange new place.

But Ray was at that awkward age. He looked different to the other boys and girls. His hair was still cut in a brutal short back and sides, he was wearing grey flannel short trousers and a short-sleeve white nylon shirt, and he was still sporting the tie and blazer of his old school.

It was the summer of 1969, and Ray Keeley was dressed like Harold Macmillan.

Although his new classmates also wore a nominal school uniform, compared to Ray they were Carnaby Street peacocks.

Long hair curled dangerously over the collars of paisley shirts, or it was cropped to the point of baldness. School ties had knots thick enough for Roger Moore. Many of the girls had hiked their regulation skirts up to just below their knickers of regulation navy blue. And lounging right at the back of the class, there were boys in pink shirts.

Pink shirts! On boys! Flipping heck!

Ray had been in England for a month. Nowhere had ever felt less like home.

‘Ray is from Hong Kong where his father was in the police force,’ announced the teacher. She picked up a ruler and slapped it twice against a map of the world. ‘Now, who knows what Hong Kong is?’

The class chanted as one, making Ray jump. ‘One of the pink bits, miss!’ ‘And what are the pink bits?’ ‘The pink bits are ours, miss!’

But Ray felt that nothing belonged to him – not the Chinese place they had left behind, or the army bases in Cyprus and Germany where his family had lived before that, and certainly not this strange suburban town where the boys and girls were dolled up as if they were going to a fancy-dress party.

A skinhead child was assigned to look after Ray but deserted him as soon as the bell went for morning playtime.

On the far side of the playground Ray could see his big brother John kicking a ball around with some of the lads. His kid brother Robbie was running in circles with a pack of little fellows, giggling like crazy. Ray stood there, not knowing where to go, what to do, or even where to put his hands. But then something happened that changed everything.

Someone started singing.

It was the chorus from ‘Hey Jude’. On and on. Voices joined in. And then there was another chant – the opening bars of ‘All You Need Is Love’.

The children kept on playing. The football and gossip didn’t stop, did not even pause for breath. The conkers and hopscotch continued. But they sang as they played.

There were more tunes, more chants – yeah, yeah, yeah – ‘She Loves You’ – and more children raising their voices in these songs that they all knew better than any hymn, better than the National Anthem.

Songs they had grown up singing, the soundtrack to all those Sixties childhoods. It was only the Beatles. Always the Beatles. As if the times that these children grew up in began and ended with John, Paul, George and Ringo. And soon the entire playground was singing and Ray Keeley stepped out among them, his senses reeling, surrounded by the music, and a world unlike any he had known before. A world of shared feelings.

Years later he wondered if he had imagined it all – the first day at the strange school, the desperate attempt to hold back the tears, the sight of his big brother playing football with his new friends somehow underlining Ray’s loneliness, and then out of nowhere the playground full of children singing Beatles songs. Certainly he never saw it happen again.

But he knew that it was real. He knew that it had really happened. He had felt it. The magic that can set you free.

And sometimes Ray felt like his entire life was about trying to get back to that moment, to recover that day when suddenly it didn’t matter that he knew no one and his clothes were all wrong, that schoolyard in 1969 where the children sang, na-na-na, yeah-yeah-yeah and love-love-love, love is all you need.

The office wasn’t empty. Ray should have known. Their office was never quite empty.

Music thundered from inside the review room, making the panel of glass in the door rattle. Ray pressed his face against the glass and saw that Skip Jones was in there. He would probably be in there all night, writing the lead album review for next week’s issue. By hand.

Despite all the modern red plastic Olivettis in the office, Skip Jones always chose to write by hand. You would see him in odd empty corners of the office, or in the review room, his long giraffe like limbs hunched over a tatty notebook, and the fact that he was left-handed and had to wrap his hand around his leaky Biro made the process seem all the more awkward and tortured and strange.

Yet Skip Jones still wrote the pants off everyone else at The Paper, effortlessly constructing this cool, pristine, sceptical prose that seemed perfect for the age, and he was the closest thing The Paper had to a legend.

Ray hated to disturb Skip Jones. But if anyone knew where Lennon would be tonight, it was Skip. He paused, working up the courage. Then Ray let himself into the review room with a diffident smile, his hair falling forward.

Skip didn’t notice him at first. He was lost in the music, consumed by his writing, surrounded by a forest of dead cigarettes that he had half-smoked and then carefully stood on their filter tips, allowing them to burn down to a bendy cone of ash.

Ray watched him work, wondering what the music was – twin lead guitars, a world-weary nasal vocal that was completely contemporary, but with a dreamy quality that was out of step with what was going on.

Ray loved to watch Skip work. It restored his faith, it made him feel that they were doing something worthwhile and important. Watching Skip made Ray feel that the music hadn’t died.

Skip leaned back in his chair, lit a cigarette and noticed Ray. He grinned and motioned him further into the room, not quite making eye contact for, while Skip Jones was the best writer at The Paper, he was the shyest man in the world. Looking you in the eye was Skip’s personal Kryptonite. Ray smiled gratefully and pulled up the room’s other chair.

‘Ray Keeley,’ Skip said. ‘Wild.’

Skip handed him the cover of the album he was reviewing. Marquee Moon by Television. Ray shook his head – never heard of it. Skip closed his eyes and nodded emphatically, indicating that this was the real deal.

‘Man, what’s the biggest selling album of the year?’ Skip said.

‘Don’t know,’ Ray said. ‘I guess it’s still Hotel California.’

‘Wild,’ Skip smiled, carefully standing his newly lit cigarette on its filter tip. ‘Laurel Canyon cowboys – cod country that the Byrds did first and harmonies that the Beach Boys did better.’ He chuckled, and Ray laughed along with Skip, even though he had always been quite fond of the Eagles, and it felt like a bit of a betrayal. ‘Well, sorry, boys – Television are going to kick your LA arses all the way back to the dude ranch.’

Ray’s eyes shone with admiration. He thought that Skip Jones looked like a buccaneer. A buccaneer who had been shipwrecked with Keith Richards and a big bag of drugs.

Skip was freakishly tall, alarmingly thin, deathbed white, and if you had seen him loping by, a stack of albums stickered with the words Promotional Copy Only: Not For Sale under his arm and about to be sold, you might have thought he was a homeless person, or a genius who could not live as mere mortals did. You would have been right on both counts.

On the rare nights when he actually went to bed, Skip Jones slept on a succession of sofas and floors across north and west London. Skip often lacked a home, but never a roof. Too many people worshipped him.

By day, Skip lurked in whatever spare corner of The Paper was free – he had no office of his own, and didn’t want one – that’s how totally rock and roll Skip was. He seemed to embody the very essence of the music. And on crumpled notepads, scraps of paper, the backs of press releases and the inside of empty cigarette packets, Skip wrote – by tormented hand, in laborious, cack-handed pencil – the most glittering words about music that anyone had ever read.

Skip was wearing the only clothes he seemed to own – torn black leather trousers, a red leather biker’s jacket and the kind of ruffled blouson that might be suitable if you found yourself fighting a duel with rapiers at dawn. He wore these elegant rags every day, in every kind of weather. Ray thought Skip looked like some kind of rock-and-roll cavalier, when everyone else was a roundhead.

Skip’s trousers were ripped at the crutch and sometimes at editorial meetings his meat and two veg were given an unexpected airing. Hardened rock chicks who thought nothing of giving head to a member of Dr Feelgood backstage at the Rainbow blushed to the roots of their dyed hair, but Skip was oblivious.

When he walked through the streets of London, rough boys with feather cuts and diamond-motif tank tops and flared jeans flapping above their steel-capped boots lobbed rocks at him. The wide world scorned him as a freak. But at the paper, Skip was revered. It wasn’t just Ray. Leon loved Skip. Terry loved Skip. He was the reason they all wanted to work for The Paper.

Skip Jones had started writing for The Paper when he was a bleary-eyed dropout from Balliol and the youngest writer on Oz, and his waspish reflections on the music’s glorious dead – Jimi Hendrix, Brian Jones, Jim Morrison, Nick Drake – and walking wounded – Lou Reed, Brian Wilson, Syd Barrett, Iggy Pop, Dag Wood – did more than anything or anyone to help Kevin White drag The Paper from underground rag to mainstream music magazine.