regimented there was nothing to do if you wanted to dance but jump up and down. The girls found this particularly hard, having grown up on the undulating rhythms of funk and soul. They stopped mid-sway, interrupted. The dancefloor that had been theirs a year ago, was now dominated by boys bouncing violently off one another.
The room was soon filled by a crowd that swirled stiffly round between the bar, the stage, the toilets and the door, some breaking away to dance, drink, kiss or smoke. Everything was dim, even the music, muffled and distorted by ancient speakers. The drinks were either plastic pint-glasses of pale lager or concoctions of something dull and something vivid – cider and blackcurrant, gin and orange, rum and peppermint.
Mary and Billy split up as soon as they were in the door. Billy, indifferent to drink, wove his way through the crowd to stand close to Terry Flux and close enough to a bass speaker to feel it booming through him. Mary inched her way to the bar, waited half an hour, bought three vodkas at once rather than try to go back again, poured them into one glass, rolled a cigarette and set off towards the stage just as Gravity came on.
Gravity were a Camptown band and their lead singer was a local hero, known as JonJo. JonJo was somewhere in his twenties which made him several years older than most of the audience. He was skinny and pale. His fine red hair was greased into a lank crest, acne scars broke the surface of his white make-up, and his nipples and ribs stood out beneath the cheap gold-lurex woman’s top stretched across his sunken chest. Altogether, he looked like a pantomime version of one of his father’s battery hens out on Factory Farm.
JonJo glided through school, with even the teachers turning a blind eye to his lipstick and bangles. In each musical transition, he had found a model that required only some minor adjustment to his style, achieved with beads, glasses, frills, a trilby or a leather waistcoat. He remained himself: flamboyant, effeminate, suave and lewd but sexless, just as the band’s music barely changed, its raw ineptitude and fantastical lyrics somehow always just fitting the bill. Boys acknowledged his glamour but didn’t want to look like him, while girls enjoyed his interest and proximity but were undisturbed by desire.
Gravity were so unrehearsed and drunk that their set quickly went to pieces. It sounded as if each member were playing a different song: the drummer was ahead of everyone else; the bass player was locked in a duel with the lead guitarist, both playing faster and more elaborate riffs; and JonJo lurched around the creaking stage, singing more or less to himself. The boys in the front loved it. Then they grew bored and began joining Gravity on stage. One grabbed JonJo’s microphone and began singing a Rolling Stones song, ‘Sweet Virginia’. JonJo shouted ‘Hippy shit!’ but danced round him and joined in on backing vocals. This was a song everyone knew. The rest of the band got behind them, more of the boys clambered up on stage and soon half of the room were singing along. Terry Flux smiled. No one would admit to having loved the Stones now but very few had tried to sell their records back to him. He predicted that within two years, early to mid-period Stones would land in ‘Collectables’.
Billy had circled back to Mary and they leant against each other, laughing and singing in an exaggerated twang. The band fell off stage and Terry Flux, who had fished around in his boxes and found that very Stones album, ‘Exile on Main Street’, filled the room with ‘Let It Loose’, a wild, tumbling down song Mary secretly loved. Most of the people in the room stood still, and looked at the floor or the ceiling.
Mary was hot and happy, being there with Billy and the song and the room, and then the boy, Daniel, appeared, pushing through the crowd, and they smiled and said nothing because nothing could be heard, and he put his hands on her shoulders so definitely that she reached up and kissed him before she met his eyes.
Terry Flux rescued his audience by filling the last hour of the evening with hard punk, The Buzzcocks’ ‘Love You More’, The Vibrators’ ‘Baby, Baby’, the same old love thing but rawer than ever.
When Daniel offered to walk Mary to the bus station, she didn’t want to lose the chance to cross town with him by admitting that the last bus had gone. On leaving The Stands, they put their arms around each other, clutching hard, and then walked awkwardly on, perhaps afraid that any adjustment would shatter their strange confidence. Mary pushed her free hand into her pocket, clutching her glasses, not in case she needed them but as if she thought they might suddenly appear of their own accord. Rather than try to see where they were going and afraid, in any case, of being seen, she kept her head down. Daniel’s hand on her shoulder couldn’t keep still but traced her bones as far as he could reach, back and forth and round from the nape of her neck to her collarbone. It was all she could do to grasp his jacket enough to hold on.
They turned into Camptown High Street which though dark, was busy. It was eleven o’clock, closing time, and the six High Street pubs were simultaneously disgorging their customers. Gangs of boys shouted names, football chants and snatches of songs, and softly punched one another. Older men as if in bloom with their beerguts, jowls and burst veins, shook each other’s thick hands and tottered off to their cars. There were proud, stiff couples and limp, bored couples; giggling trios of girls who linked arms to hold each other up; and solitary men who went to the same pub for years and sat at the bar, side by side, speaking only to borrow a newspaper or order a drink.
In daytime, people were hemmed onto the pavements of the High Street by heavy traffic. Now, they walked in the road in their twos, threes and fours. The occasional mini-cab or lorry had to slow down and negotiate. The town centre was mostly unlit. There were no neon signs or brilliant shop windows. Even Blazes, the town’s nightclub, made do with a carriage lamp over the hand-painted sign in its mews archway. Only the biggest and oldest pub, The Market Place, was lit. Its stout plaster exterior carried a string of bulbs, like beads of sweat, just below its thatch. It was the drinking place of land and money: farmers, bankers, accountants, estate managers, stud owners, game keepers.
No one looked ready to go home. Even the few who were not at least a little drunk, felt an exaggerated lightness with the relief of the end of the week, and the unaccustomed pleasure of warm darkness. It wasn’t like being on holiday because for most people, holidays were not associated with heat. Nor did they have any special holiday clothes. No one was wearing anything bright and it was too hot for the fashionable shades of purple, ochre, yellow, lime, or the bottom-heavy shapes of pear-drop collars, maxi skirts and platform boots. Even the farmers and bankers were out in plain white shirtsleeves.
Boys in white T-shirts began to circle and call to girls in white dresses. Daniel in grey and Mary in black, kept their silence even when a weeping girl spun into them, stared, laughed and ran off. Each privately burned with shame when a boy clutching a lamp-post vomited just as they passed. There was a couple in a doorway, the girl smoking, her dress unbuttoned; the boy’s hands and mouth on her breasts. Someone shouted ‘You cunt!’ and there was a rush of footsteps and the sound of a windscreen shattering. There was a police car outside Blazes, where two officers were pulling a man up from the gutter, his frilly shirt sprinkled with blood.
Unless summoned, the police kept away from the High Street and concentrated on places like The Stands or the main roads and roundabouts out of town, where they would stop and search whomever they felt like. Billy and Mary were stopped all the time, walking down a lane, driving round on Billy’s bike, or hitching a ride home. Mostly, they just had to give their names and addresses and say where they were going to. The police were sure a hippy like Billy would have drugs on him but they never found them and they were confused by the girl, who didn’t look like the hippy’s type.
The bus station was a cavernous hangar with fifteen bays. Each had a concrete bench and a plastic frame nailed to the wall where there used to be a timetable, above which were faded indecipherable bus numbers. There was one bus, parked under sprinklers that poured water over its soapy bodywork. Daniel and Mary walked towards it, as if wanting to maintain for as long as possible the fiction that they had come here for Mary to go home. A man in overalls, carrying a large brush, appeared.
‘Exempt, see …’ he said, patting the bus with his brush like an elephant keeper. ‘Says we have to keep the windows clean, for safety and that.’ The water gurgled and splashed around their feet. They let go of each other, turned and walked back out onto the station forecourt.
Now