‘Thought you could use something.’

  ‘I don’t need your bread.’

  Paul considered. ‘How about horse, smack, glue, nail-polish remover?’

  The girl looked at him pityingly. ‘That’s a dumb unaware scene.’

  ‘What is this?’ Paul appealed to Gemma. ‘A chick here won’t suck it, lick it, drop it, shoot it.’

  ‘You’re wearing the wrong gear,’ murmured Gemma.

  Paul let out a low whistle and hurriedly removed his jacket and his shirt to reveal a white singlet, announcing in blood-coloured letters ‘Sterilize L.B.J.’. Moving on, Paul began offering Smarties to passers-by. He seemed puzzled by the number of refusals. ‘So drugs aren’t cool any more?’

  ‘It’s macrobiotics, now,’ said Gemma.

  Paul sprayed the sweets skywards in a wide arc. He grinned at Matthew. ‘Boy, is this scene deadsville.’ On the platform a feeble West Coast group had been replaced by a female singer, who was a look-alike for Cher, of Sonny and Cher. She drifted into a wistful number; Simon and Garfunkel on a bad day.

  ‘Hey, Mr Everyday,

  Have you heard the news today?

  This is what the papers say,

  Smog in cities everywhere,

  Soon can’t breathe the living air …’

  Gemma tugged at Matthew’s arm. ‘Pollution songs made it for a while.’

  Matthew nodded. ‘You reckon I could have cleaned-up on a theme song for my series?’

  ‘It’s too late now.’

  ‘So how do you keep Roy going for over a month?’

  She smiled. ‘For starters he won’t be writing his own stuff.’

  ‘Don’t most groups insist on it these days?’

  ‘You’re listening to the result.’

  Gemma’s indignation amused Matthew. He imagined her telling professional song writers exactly what she wanted; putting poor Roy through complicated choreographic routines, choosing his wardrobe.

  ‘What you’ve got to understand,’ she told Matthew, ‘is that rock’s about doing things to an audience, not about music for its own sake.’

  So, whither Roy? Matthew wondered. Now that acid dreams were passé, and smashing up instruments a period romp, what was left? Suicide rock? Blood capsules, and wild animals on stage?

  Shortly after a diversion, created by a naked man shinning up one of the towering organ pipes, Paul caught sight of Roy near the stage. On the well-tried supposition that few meetings happened by chance in Paul’s company, Matthew guessed the singer was being wheeled on to show the progress he had made since the weekend at Delvaux (‘progress’ in this context being the extent to which his own opinions had given way to Paul’s).

  As Roy came up, he smiled broadly. ‘I could’ve been into crap like this, if Paul and Gemma hadn’t pulled me out.’

  ‘That’s great,’ agreed Matthew.

  Apparently not satisfied by Matthew’s tone, Roy moved closer. ‘Wait a bit … lemme tell you. I think real pop’s dead centre,’ he insisted. ‘You’ve seen those promo movies for groups? Popular scenario – the lads in some luxy motor showroom, bouncing around in the Silver Wraith, rattling the cocktail cabinet, shaking ash on the deep pile, having a party, when wambo … this smarmy assistant tells them to leg it.’ He pauses: smiles wrily. ‘Okay, you got it … they make with the big cheque-book and Jeez does that creep jump.’

  Matthew frowned. ‘I don’t get the message … the lads have thrown a spanner in world capitalism?’

  Paul remarked casually, ‘Seems clear enough to me. The biggest lout that ever left school with twenty words in his head can make straight society kiss his arse if he’s got enough gravy in the bank.’

  Roy snapped his fingers. ‘Work your balls off for fifty years … no dice, no Silver Wraith, no deep pile. So better get in on the act.’

  ‘Or if you can’t, better identify with the lads who can.’ This from Gemma. She took Matthew’s arm. ‘Don’t look so sour, Matty. If nobody believes in genius or tradition, what’s left but money? End result – the kids who haven’t got it get a king-sized identity crisis.’

  ‘So they hitch on to whatever’s raking it in biggest in pop culture.’ Roy stared at Matthew as if daring him to deny it. ‘And that’s not going to be Ravi Shankar and Indian finger cymbals, but stuff that’s fast and flash, and into sex and living plush.’

  ‘Pop gets to the masses or it’s nowhere?’ suggested Matthew, remembering Roy’s irony about these sentiments at Delvaux.

  Roy eyed him squarely. ‘Mass market means money for some, vicarious kicks for others. So? We can’t all be into heavy movies.’

  ‘Sad but true,’ murmured Gemma, who had obviously enjoyed Roy’s performance.

  Twenty minutes later Paul suggested leaving – apparently the demonstration was over. Out in the car park, Roy walked with Gemma, while Paul and Matthew followed at a distance.

  ‘You’re pleased with him?’ asked Matthew neutrally.

  ‘I think he’s starting to get his thoughts together.’

  Wanting to laugh, Matthew managed not to; then, just when starting to feel safe, a snorting cackle burst out. Paul looked at him enquiringly. Across the car park, a group of ravers were clambering into a pink and white converted hearse, looking like a groovy paste-up for a psychedelic record sleeve. But that was all dead now, according to Gemma, which made the hearse appropriate. Approaching Paul’s black Bristol, Matthew wondered what Roy would soon be driving (and if he would be called Roy by the time he was driving it). Very likely he won’t actually drive what he’s going to say he does, ditto for the food he’ll claim to like, the ideas he’ll have, or thinks he has, after the great taking apart and reassembling. Look no stitches.

  By the time Matthew clambered into the car with the others, he had got the message. Unless he could persuade Roy to speak for himself on camera, and stop acting as Paul’s mouthpiece, the film would merely mark Paul’s apotheosis as one of the decade’s grand masters of media manipulation. Over my dead body, he told himself.

  ‘Why so glum Matty?’ asked Gemma, nudging him. ‘Don’t worry about whether we can make the thing original.’

  ‘Like the Beatles said,’ laughed Paul, ‘take an old song and make it better.’

  ‘They said, “Take a sad song”,’ murmured Matthew.

  ‘If the “fab four” won’t do,’ suggested Paul, ‘try Tradition and the Individual Talent.’

  ‘We didn’t make the goddam river,’ declared Gemma, ‘but we can have a bloody good swim in it.’

  ‘I’m all for swimming with your talent,’ muttered Roy, turning authoritatively to Paul. ‘Home James.’

  ‘Which home, sir?’

  ‘The one with the golf course on the roof.’ Roy rolled his eyes at Matthew. ‘That was a joke, man.’

  ‘I’d wait and see,’ advised Matthew.

  7

  Only a few months back, Roy had seen the easy pickings grabbed by companies like Exodus as a sick rip-off. Though nominally a music publisher, just a fraction of its income came from sheet music; the vast majority gushing in as record royalties on song rights and management fees on artists. Now that he was being paid a weekly retainer for doing sod all, his disapproval had lost some of its bite. Enough leeches bleeding the profit-vampires might even do the job the taxman couldn’t manage. That’d been Roy’s own notion; but Paul was the real maestro in that line. ‘Why worry about changing your point of view? Think what the Victorians believed … what people thought ten years ago. This is a fact, Roy: the only truth that never changes, is that truth is always changing.’ And that’d been fine (nothing wrong with raping a few principles in private), but on film it mightn’t look such a gas.

  This was what had bothered Roy ever since the evening at Alexandra Palace. Before the film had started to look more like a real possibility than a wanker’s day-dream, Roy had doubted whether Paul had the umph to get things going. But the way he’d dinned into him what to say to Matthew, had changed Roy’s mind. He was serious all right, but way off target. Free publicity certainly didn’t come any better than fifty minute TV documentaries, but was Matthew going to hand that out to anyone he half-way suspected of sending him up?

  But when Roy said this to Paul, he told him not to worry. This was on one of Paul’s infrequent visits to his office in the steel and glass tower occupied by Exodus and seven other companies. Though Paul only spent a few hours a week there, Roy knew for a fact that he had recently been attending meetings, and had even started beavering around making outside contacts.

  Paul swung round in his leather swivel-chair and looked out at the trees in Hyde Park. ‘You see, Roy,’ he murmured, ‘Matty’s problems are Matty’s problems. It’s more important for us to sort out what we’re aiming for, and stick to it.’

  ‘Which shouldn’t mean I carry on like Moses selling the Ten Commandments.’

  Across the room, Gemma poured herself coffee from a bubbling percolator. ‘What you’ve got to understand is Matthew doesn’t go for people who don’t believe in what they do. That’s why you’ve got to get behind your image.’

  ‘Dead right,’ declared Paul, swinging round to face Roy. ‘This is what we agreed we didn’t want: the “ordinary” kid type of star … ex-secondary modern lad from the suburbs, lively, no hang-ups, disarmingly natural. Musical talent obvious when he started banging a toffee tin aged three; first guitar at ten; bought a purple jacket with velvet lapels and joined the youth club group at sixteen …’

  What was spooky about Paul, Roy decided, was the casual way he made disagreement look crazy. On the walls of his office were photographic blow-ups of a few dozen celebrities, almost all members of the class of ’62 to ’65. Hardly a new face for ’68 and ’69. Just oldies: Animals, Kinks, Bee Gees, Beach Boys, Who, Stones. Like a game of musical chairs where the winners of the mid-Sixties got mean and refused to leave their seats. And if the normal rules of built-in obsolescence had been suspended, Paul was even righter about the need for a change. No more self-pitying songs, no more pie in the sky rebellion; not that he meant to ditch the ‘ordinary’ kid entirely; nobody got any teen votes who was stuck-up and out of reach. So keep the ‘one of us’ idea, and add enough brains to work the system by seeing through it. Success and subversion in the same package. But Paul still hadn’t said how they could stop him looking like a rat-faced teen-hustler, smugger than Bond and as corny.

  When Roy pitched in with this, Gemma did the answering.

  ‘Just because you can’t stand drabness and drifting, it doesn’t mean you’re some greasy Mr Fix-it.’ She was in her ‘girl in a man’s world’ journalist gear (shaggy old sheepskin waistcoat and patched denims), and her no-nonsense manner matched. ‘Most successes are a bit paranoid with it. Isn’t that how to play it? Plenty of public cool, but a hint of psychic poisons gnawing away inside. You’re too good at being anguished on stage to end up a slick fixer.’

  Behind her head, Roy’s eye briefly rested on a placard reading POLITICS IS PART OF SHOW BIZZ, and next to it a picture of the Prime Minister, grinning like a jackass, arm in arm with two knockabout comedians. Paul got up abruptly, announcing that he had to see a man about a camera. A camera? Was that just one more thing being said to phase him? Like he and Gemma were supposed to be doing something later that hadn’t been spelled out. But when he asked questions, the big hint was dropped that he was asking them to explain things too plonking obvious to need it. Drift along with us, baby, was the message he kept getting; and the way they put it over, nine times out of ten he drifted. What was more bothering, he thought, following Gemma to the door, was how little he had started to mind.

  Sitting next to Gemma, as she flipped her yellow roadster in and out of lane, Roy wondered how she hadn’t killed herself years ago. Whenever she stopped zapping him with her switched-on stunt, he enjoyed being with her. But her obvious simpatico with Lord Paul was a ‘Hands Off sign he didn’t reckon there’d be much point ignoring. An odd set-up though; if she and Paul were balling each other (and they had to be) what would Gemma think about Eleanor? Husbands didn’t just look at wives like that when they got home; unless they were headcases. Himself, Roy guessed he’d stick to Eleanor; though for guys who liked their birds armour-plated, Gemma was obviously a challenge for their tin-openers.

  Soon they were jinking about in a network of side-streets between King’s Cross and Islington – not a part of town Roy knew too well. Gemma flung the Lotus round another corner and slowed down a bit.

  ‘I’ve been thinking about your name,’ she said out of the blue; maybe because she was also looking at a lot of street names.

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘You say “yeah” quite a bit, Roy.’

  ‘Yeah,’ he echoed. ‘Think I should call meself Vince or Marty?’

  Gemma sniffed. ‘I rather like Rory, actually. Almost Roy, but better.’

  ‘Rory what?’

  ‘Rory Craig. No folksy crap like Lightbody or Green-water. Nothing too commercial … Flame, Fury, and that stuff.’ They had started to curb-crawl, and a van was flashing them. Gemma ignored it. ‘I know Rory’s slightly pretty-pretty, but Craig’s rugged enough to make the contrast bite.’ She stopped the car and started flipping through a street map. ‘Keep your finger there,’ she told him, thrusting the map in his direction.

  The street in question turned out to be a run-down terrace, scheduled for demolition, with one side already rubble. On one of the surviving houses, squatters had painted a huge bleeding eye, peering out of a tangle of thorn bushes. ‘That’s the one,’ said Gemma, indicating the house next door.

  Her deadpan, uninformative approach amused Roy. If she thought he was going to start begging her to explain things, she could think again. Out on the pavement she looked round appreciatively. ‘Not bad?’ she murmured. ‘Paul found it.’

  ‘He’s thinking of moving house?’

  ‘Not him, Roy. No … for this film you’ve got to live somewhere. Or at least we’ve got to show you living somewhere.’

  Roy laughed drily. ‘You reckon my real pad isn’t kitchen-sink enough? Wanted some place that’d make Arnold Wesker throw-up?’

  ‘Course not,’ she laughed. ‘What we wanted was somewhere falling apart, sure; but only for the contrast. In the midst of chaos, there’s your room; an island of order.’ She smiled encouragingly. ‘You get things together whatever your surroundings.’

  ‘Do I get to choose my own place when I’ve made it?’

  ‘You’re not going to live here, Roy,’ she said patiently.

  ‘So I’m uh in amongst the garbage, but sort of away from it?’

  She nodded enthusiastically. ‘Exactly. A touch of remoteness is going to make people want to get through to you.’

  The house chosen for his television home was a fair-sized Victorian building, smelling of rot but so far not broken apart by vandals. At the top of the staircase, Gemma unlocked a door and walked into a freshly whitewashed room. Iron bedstead, scrubbed pine table, a rush-bottomed chair like Van Gogh painted, and a couple of grainy art pics on the walls: one of a naked girl in front of an open window (too much light flooding past to see her tits or pubes); the other of a man with one made-up eye and a clown’s dead-white face. A piano too.

  ‘So what do I do when the camera’s here?’ Roy looked around. ‘Crouch under the table?’

  ‘Can you play the piano?’ Roy shook his head. ‘So you listen to records. Maybe nothing to do with pop. Wagner might be right. That’s good because …’ She kicked at the chair-leg in exasperation, ‘Jesus, you know what I mean.’

  Roy nodded; and suddenly he did know what she meant. A shot from outside. One lighted window the only sign of life in the decaying house. Loud music. Wagner. The camera moves in. Cut to interior and he’s sitting in his monk’s hideaway, drawing weird things like the eye on the wall. On sound, commentary about Rory Craig coming a long way since he lived in Desolation Row, but ‘Rory still has that inner karma, that self-sufficiency that cuts out the kinda crap most unaware shits fill their lives with …’ He grinned to himself, then told Gemma he could be drawing weird stuff. She liked it.

  ‘I went to art school, didn’t I?’ He was pleased with the way he’d asked this as a question.

  ‘You could have done that,’ she agreed, thinking about it.

  And then, unexpectedly, something seemed to click, and he saw it from her side. They weren’t talking about him at all, but this Rory charmer. They could make up any damned thing they liked, and it was no reflection on Roy Flannery. So why not do it different? No smashing up hotel rooms, no jumping on car bonnets. No cute publicity about buying gran a bungalow, and liking model railways. What a prat he’d been not to get there quicker. When he started in with ideas too, his hang-ups about them doing all the thinking wouldn’t figure.

  He sucked in his cheeks. ‘I think we oughta work out what’s given me this loneliness thing.’ Gemma agreed.

  On the way back to the West End, and what turned out to be a Balinese restaurant full of puppets and rubbery plants, Roy’s factory foreman father became a dead merchant seaman, and his mother played around with being a cinema usherette and a retired chorus girl. The usherette might be good because Roy would have cut his teeth on more movies than most people dreamed of. Pretty way-out educationally. Waiting for their food, they drank some hooch fermented from Balinese bark (Gemma’s story) that tasted less like paint-stripper after the second glass. Roy said he ought to have a kid sister in a nut house, which could account for the loneliness, and make him want to screw the system that screwed her.

  ‘Mustn’t be too bleak, Roy.’

  ‘I was thinking a bit more like Orton’s plays … black comedy and all that.’ He frowned. ‘Could be too sophisticated?’

  Gemma smiled. ‘Could be.’

  The bark juice made Roy feel fairly relaxed after another glass, and he started asking a few pertinent questions, like how was he ever going to make it without a group, and without any songs? But Gemma said not to worry because Paul had had an amazing idea that’d make him famous before his first single had even been pressed.