“What do you think?” I said. “I put my heart and soul into it.” – “Well,” she said, twisting a curl of hair around her little finger, “I still think you could do a hell of a lot better.”
The conversation inside his head ran along the following lines. Why don’t you get a job, Charles? Dad, you know I’m trying. Not hard enough, says dad. Jobs, says mum, hardly grow on trees around here, do they? Then the crockery would be thrown. Charlie was like the pig in the middle ducking the body blows. Really, it had nothing to do with him.
Charlie Drake lived a year on the dole. Then he packed his suitcase and guitar and left home. When he arrived in London, he had a thousand pounds in his pocket, most of which went on a deposit and three months’ rent for a bed-sit in New Cross.
It was a drab room with a bed in the corner, a kitchenette with a two-ring hob and noisy fridge, a couple of unholy armchairs and a Formica-topped coffee table. None of this, however, bothered Charlie blue-tacked some posters to the wall, lined the mantelpiece with his books, and plugged in his amp.
Charlie made friends with Fergus, who had the bed sit above his. He found a job working in a shop in Covent Garden. He hit off with one of the managers, chap called Steve Lopez, and fell for a London girl called Harriet. He worked in the shop for two months, until the person he’d substituted came back from holiday and he was asked to leave. He found a second job in a bar near the new Hays Gallery just opened up on the south side of the river. He worked alongside two ex-army boys from Surrey Docks who treated him with utter contempt. The rush was always on at lunchtime for the clientele of city boys and hacks. At the end of three weeks, the manager told Charlie he couldn’t cut it pulling pints, mate, and gave him the sack.
The night following his sacking, Charlie was sitting in his room, wrapped in a blanket, when he received a visit from Fergus.
Charlie told Fergus his news; offering his condolences, Fergus placed his tobacco tin on the coffee table between them. Charlie cooked up some beans on the two-ring hob. They ate their beans on toast, drank a bottle of cheap red wine, and shared a joint. Charlie played Fergus a couple of songs including his favourite: Tempis fugit. To round off the evening, Fergus brought down a tape of West African music. Fergus, he thought, was a top bloke.
The following day Charlie got up late and went into town to look for another job. He thought about paying a visit to Steve Lopez and Harriet. Then he thought better of it. Steve Lopez had said, “With a girl like Harriet you have to stay cool.” He thought of Harriet in her black clothes and DMs and the little beauty spot on her face – elusive London cool as seen through Steve’s American cool. After a while, he got depressed thinking about the cool Harriet and the cool Steve.
Charlie went and bought a sandwich and a can of coke. He sat in the gardens at the back of Charing Cross, listening to a cover band. They played some nice blues, which soon perked him up. He rang home from a call box and got dad. Charlie tried to make conversation, but all he got were monosyllables back.
“Dad, has she walked out on you?”
Dad never answered, because Charlie ran out of money.
When Charlie got back to his bed-sit later, the door to his bedsit opened without having to turn the key.
Wondering if he’d actually locked it, Charlie panicked about his emergency stash, which he kept in an envelope under the sheet of wallpaper that lined the top of the wardrobe. Someone had been through his things, but his guitar and amp were in the corner of the room where he’d left them. He looked under his bed to check on his spare boots. He skimmed his collection of books on the mantle-piece, but he could not see his copy of The Necessary Angel. It was full of his notes and annotations, and that immortal quote from Schegler: “poetry must not become a hospital”.
At an all-time low, Charlie lay on his bed thinking ill of the world, and particularly Fergus. He wanted to run away from London, but could not face the idea of going back home to all those old arguments between mum and dad.
Charlie’s desperation was up at Centre Point with the suicides. The rent was due, and he could not find a job. Charlie did not want to go back on the dole. He went to the shop in Covent Garden and asked for Harriet, but it was her day off. Steve Lopez was working in the other shop on the King’s Road. He walked all over Covent Garden looking for jobs and hoping he would bump into Harriet and they could go for a cappuccino. The fates were against him.
Charlie hopped on the bus and went to see Steve Lopez. When he got to the shop, there was a rush on and Steve did not have any time to talk. Charlie was down to his last twenty and tenner; apart from a couple of ham and cheese sandwiches, he had not eaten in three days. He rolled into a pub on the Kings Road and bought himself a roll. An old gentleman, sat at the bar with a pint and a chaser, inveigled him in conversation. – “Got the most smashing figure, don’t you think?”
The knuckle of the Old Gentleman’s ring finger was pointing to the supermodel on the wall among the bric-a-brac and Victoriana.
Plied with drinks and conversation, Charlie began to enjoy himself.
“Do you like literature, young man?”
“In principle,” he said.
They conducted a wide-ranging conversation about books, poetry and the arts. The Old Gentleman was a confirmed classicist. He did not approve of anything after the Edwardians. Charlie had fun trying to explain Schegler and Stevens (to the Old Gentleman merely an American advertising executive). Charlie guessed correctly he hated twentieth century music and would only listen to Wagner. The Old Gentleman loved Titian and the Renaissance. He adored Poussin’s Et in Arcadia Ego… expounding on his theory regarding its intricate symbolism. Whether for lack of food or booze, Charlie’s imagination began to run riot. The Old Gentleman had rather long fingernails and an exceptionally untidy beard.
Charlie made his excuses and left via the toilets. He went back to the shop, but Steve Lopez had gone home early. He could not face going back to his bed-sit. He took the bus back to the West End. He wandered around the shops; commiserating with the drunks and the dossers, he began to feel faint.
Charlie was ill for two days – running a temperature. On the third he rose and went out to answer an ad for a telesales job, but found when he got there, he was unable to answer a single question of the entry test. “It was a like a cryptic crossword,” he told Steve Lopez. “When I filled in the blanks, the only words I could see were penury and woe.”
Here on the brink of penury and woe, Charlie’s luck began to change, though perhaps not in the way he imagined on his most tripped out Harriet reverie.
Steve Lopez lent him fifty quid from the till. Then, on the up escalator at Charing Cross, Charlie bumped into Guy who he had not seen since Nottingham. “It was like a situation out of Dance to the Music of Time,” he told Steve Lopez. “Only we had no club to go to.”
Guy was selling hats on the market by the St. Martins-in-the-Field church. While he helped Guy set up his stall, they reminisced about making songs. Guy had a terrible singing voice but a true poet’s way with words. After the market Charlie tagged along with Guy who was off to meet his mate, Jimmy in the pub. They went back to Jimmy’s flat; the rest was history. In a few days, they had formed a band. Though they could not settle on the name, Charlie knew it was going to work out, regardless of what dad thought or his monosyllables conveyed.
Not long after this, Joe came down to London and Charlie moved into the flat in South Clapham with Jimmy and a mate of Jimmy’s called Renton who was trying to make shorts. They had come up with the chorus for a song called, provisionally, Car Boot Sale. Though he never bumped into Harriet again, Charlie began to feel excitement – excitement that he rarely ever associated with London afterwards, but remained, nevertheless, with him through the following episode.
The day they went to get the stuff from his old bed-sit in New Cross, all three of them were stood outside Fergus’s door: Jimmy’s mate, Paul, with a hammer and chisel, and Jimmy behind him with the monkey wrench. – It was enough to make Charlie crack up. “After all,” he told Steve Lopez, as he handed over the fifty quid note, “all I wanted was my copy of the Necessary Angel back.”