Barry took the tab at breakfast with his coffee. He skimmed through the mail: now he was fifty he could have ?00 off his next car insurance and might win a trip around the world. He didn’t drive. He had timed everything perfectly but the delivery – expected at 9 – was late. The drug was already kicking in and he was beginning to feel light and strange in his own room as the man with the large ears and little nose unpacked boxes and complained about yesterday’s customers.
ot a jot on the floor, naked kids running about and the latest wide screen and all the works.’ Barry tried to keep up with the man’s dark eyes, which shifted around too quickly in their sockets. ave you got sweets in?’ Barry thought he heard and when he shrugged was told, or the kids tonight. Little beggars won’t leave you alone.’
Barry said there was no need to set it up, he worked in an electrical shop and could manage but by then the man was on all fours laying cable and squatting to demonstrate the various sound options.
all. Live. Rock. You name it. Orchestral.’ He waved the remote like a baton. He talked as if he lived here and Barry was the visitor.
Wasn’t it good now though to hear Hendrix as he’d never heard him, from five speakers. The lazy guitar of Hey Joe. He lay back on the sofa and dropped through to other sofas and rooms he’d lain in and been at ease. Way back on the green settee with Nina, his girlfriend for two months, when her parents were out. Parties where everybody reclined on scatter cushions, conversation limited by the bass heavy reggae and not much dancing either, you had to be cool, only getting up to kneel over the huge bong when it came round. At weekends there was sometimes dancing, after acid or mescaline in pills or on blotting paper. He remembered tripping on the flare of his loons (which had to touch the floor) and making it into a dance move. Girls had whirled skirt and hair out in circles to Zep or Cream or Caravan; and later under stairs or in bathrooms he got handfuls of tit and tastes of them.
The re-grouping in pubs and cafes the following weekend, pubs closed at 2pm, to discuss what happened after, how they got home in such a state, breathless and dodging skinheads. How they had outwitted drunken lungers, and negotiated dangerous roads where cars were out to eat you. How this one spent the night in the brand new toilets of the motorway service station ?xcellent facilities’, and that one was nearly fucked by a donkey when he slept in a barn; how all somehow had seen the sun rise from the side of a road or under a hedge, the fields and back lanes, the edge of town of his youth.
?When Barry and Maxine moved in together, they tried to get more sophisticated: instead of getting out of their heads immediately they would have dinner parties with candles, meals of nut roast and sweet potatoes and play Dylan and Roxy Music until they finished the Viennetta and got out the big rizlas and put on Peter Tosh or Burning Spear.
????
He remembered Maxine’s fads, how she grew out of fringed leather jackets and boots quickly, on to the multicoloured waistcoats. When she only wore that. How she got into Greek food when the restaurant opened in town; the stray cats she fed out the back; her languor on Sundays lying the length of the sofa, like him now, bringing her chocolates and drinks and rewarded with sex.
He tried to read the free paper pushed through the door but the headlines merged: Queen Eats Ambassador’s Son; Freed Man Topples Bridge, and little wavering flames flared up from between the lines of print to print him with burns.
He lay on turf with dripping water nearby and a hidden but throbbing power station, the leaning tower of Nina helped him with his tea.
The doorbell rang a second time and it was Tom. 慔owdy pardner.’ He was panting from the bike ride across town and pushed his vehicle in straight through to the kitchen. idn’t know if you’d be in.’ offee? Bong? Pills?’
?I’m from the National Blonde Service,” she said to me,’ Tom said to him leaning back on his chair and stretching out long legs. Barry could hear the faint pops and cracks of sinews and gristle and saw how they coloured the air around Tom. His friend’s head went back when he exhaled as if pushed back by the smoke, an elephant’s trunk of it, he still had hanks of hair hanging either side of his head, left from the days when it was abundant and flowing.
eople on top of the world,’ said Tom, ow do they keep their balance?’ Then he stopped to lift and blow into an imaginary saxophone as Mirror in the Bathroom broke out; nodding in praise of the new system.They tried to make packet soup but ended up eating rubble with gulps of warm water. Luckily there was a lot of chocolate.ou prepared well, captain,’ said Tom, eyeing bars in the fridge, and turned to salute him.anke-shun,ugg boots sale, mein heir.’ He didn’t know why he’d turned German.
?They bumped into each other on the stairs. They talked as if they’d met in the countryside, on the stairs there, as if wind was ruffling their hair and they had ruddy complexions.
??Finally Barry bundled him out, bike and all,knightsbridge ugg boots ugg164 W82p, both vowing they would grow up soon, glancing up and down a street that seemed to come out of fog and concertina in and out around him,ugg boots ugg177 Z20k, for the next interruption. The second phase of the drug was settling in, one that went right to his extremities, and he wanted to wank, wank longly over Maxine and Nina both. Maxina. Mixed up together for him and with only his pleasure in mind. But he’d only got to the first imaginings,ugg boots ugg73 T24q, Maxine with Nina’s legs, when the doorbell rang again.
?Maxine. She walked in as if out of a cubist painting both eyes on the same side of her angular face, which was wrong because if Maxine was known for anything it was the roundness of her face. He couldn’t be sure it was her who he’d been picturing so recently. A voice came from her that was the same, similar, but he couldn’t place the tone or manner, even the accent.
K, OK,’ he heard himself say to himself and turned away from her dark maroon patterned clothes with yellow buttons like beams of light, torches into his room. First time he’d seen her she was in a yellow top, blouse with wide cuffs, some kind of matching hair band too, in the days when those things were worn.
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