The office was divided by grey, seven-foot-high partitions that made up the individual offices. It looked like a corporate maze. But if you knelt on your desk you could see over the top of the partitions. Two offices down he saw her – shockingly gorgeous, although he could not work out why. It was something to do with the way she carried herself. But he felt it for the first time – the little swoon of longing.
‘I’ve gone for a look of emptiness and stillness,’ she was telling the picture editor. ‘I think you’ll find it’s redolent of the Gerard Malanga shots of Warhol and the Velvet Underground.’
She had been taking pictures of Boney M.
Together Misty and the picture editor were poring over her contact sheets, these glossy black sheets of paper with tiny photographs – Terry had never seen a contact sheet before – drawing lines in red felt-tip around the shots they liked, then finally choosing one image by placing a cross next to it. Like a kiss, Terry thought, knowing already that it was hopeless. She was way out of his league.
‘I know they’re ridiculous,’ Misty was saying. ‘But it’s like Warhol himself said, Everybody’s plastic, but I love plastic.’
She looked up then and caught Terry’s eye and he attempted a smile that came out as an idiot leer. She frowned impatiently, and it just made her look prettier, and made him ache with hopeless yearning. And just then the two older guys came for him.
They loped into his office with no door, all faded denim and lank hair, untouched by the changes happening on what Terry and everyone else on The Paper thought of as the street.
‘Smoke, man?’ one of them said.
Terry was immediately on his feet, practically snapping to attention, and holding out a packet of Silk Cut. And the older guys looked at each other and smiled.
Five minutes later Terry felt like he was dying.
With the giant spliff still in his hand, Terry shivered and shuddered, the sweat pouring down his face, his back, making his capped T-shirt stick to his skin. He wanted to lie down. He wanted to be sick. He wanted it all to be over.
The older guys had stopped cackling with laughter and were starting to look concerned. Their faces swam in front of Terry’s rolling eyes. One of them prised the joint from Terry’s fist.
‘Are you okay, man?’
‘He’s really wasted, man.’
They were in the shadow of the monstrous grey tower block that was home to The Paper – an entire skyscraper full of magazines about every subject under the sun, from stamp collecting and hunting foxes and cars and football and knitting all the way to music, three titles on every floor – loitering in a scrap of wasteland that doubled as a makeshift car park, overlooking a silvery patch of the Thames and the mournful tug boats.
‘Don’t feel well,’ Terry croaked. ‘Might sit down. Until feel better.’
The older guys went, leaving him to his fate. It was…now what was the word? What was the word that people on The Paper had used all morning when something was even slightly out of the ordinary, like the lady who came round with the sandwiches running out of cheese-and-tomato rolls? Oh yes – Terry remembered the word. It was surreal.
His thoughts felt like they were being formed in quicksand. He could taste his stomach in his mouth. He pressed his clammy face against the tower block, moaning, and felt the entire skyscraper slide away from him. Surreal didn’t quite cover it. Terry had been poisoned.
And then Ray Keeley was standing before him.
Even through the thick fog of industrial-strength ganja, Terry knew it was him. Ray was wearing a Stetson, like Dennis Hopper in Easy Rider, and it made him look like a hallucination, a vision of the Old West glimpsed on the banks of the Thames.
Ray Keeley was only seventeen, but Terry had been reading his stuff for years. Every week Terry looked at Ray’s by-line picture in The Paper – he looked like those early shots of Jackson Browne, the open-faced matinee idol eyes peering out from behind the veil of long, lank, wheat-coloured hair – a teenage hippy heart-throb -and the envy came at Terry in waves, like a toothache.
Ray was the rising star on The Paper in the mid-Seventies, a pretty and precocious fifth-former rhapsodising about Joni Mitchell, Jackson Browne and the whole California thing that seemed so very far away now. And Ray liked the Beatles, especially the Beatles, even though they were further away than anything, even though they had broken up a full six years ago, and John was hiding in the Dakota and Paul was touring with his wife and Ringo was banging out the novelty records and George was disappearing up his own Hari Krishna.
You read Ray Keeley and you forgot about the three-day week and the miners’ strike and the streets full of rat-infested rubbish that no one was ever going to collect. All the grey dreariness slipped away when you read Ray Keeley on seeing Dylan at Wembley, reviewing Joni Mitchell’s Court and Spark, even trying to give Wings the benefit of the doubt. You read Ray and suddenly it was yesterday once more, summer in the Sixties, the party that everyone under the age of twenty-five had missed. You forgot about Ted Heath and thought about making love to Joni in the dunes on the beach at Monterey.
But Ray wasn’t writing so much lately.
‘You all right?’ he asked Terry, with the expression of one who already knew the answer.
Terry shook his head, speechless, feeling as if his body was paralysed and his mind was broken and his tongue was the size of an oven glove.
Then Ray did something unexpected. He put his arm around him. ‘You’ve got to take it easy with that stuff,’ he said. ‘These guys are used to it. You’re not. Come on, let’s get you back to the office. Before someone shops us.’
‘How’d you know?’ Terry mumbled. ‘How’d you know me from The Paper?’
Ray grinned. ‘Not from Horse and Hounds, are you?’ Terry laughed. ‘Nah!’
Ray half-dragged and half-carried Terry back to the office, and sat him at his desk, and gave him orange juice and black coffee until the shivering and the sweating and the sickness began to subside. Ray took care of Terry when he had been left to melt in the dirt by a couple of the older guys, and it was a simple act of decency that Terry would never forget. He tried to thank him but his tongue was a dead weight.
‘Be cool, man,’ Ray told him. ‘Just take it easy now.’
All that first morning people had been telling Terry to be cool and take it easy. The music had changed, and most of the haircuts, and people were throwing away their flares and buying straight-legged trousers, but the language was still largely the lexicon of the Sixties.
For all the changes, for all the new things, a different language had yet to be invented. All that old-fashioned jive about being mellow and taking it easy and loving one another was still around. Be cool. Take it easy.
All that first morning these worn-out old words had sounded empty to Terry Warboys. But he found himself giving his new friend a stoned, wonky smile.
Because Terry thought that when Ray Keeley said these things, they actually sounded as though they meant something.
Ray let himself into the house, and was immediately assaulted by the smell of home-brewed beer and the sound of the television.
‘Miss Belgian Congo is a nineteen-year-old beautician who says her ambition is to travel, end all wars and meet Sacha Distel.’
‘Back again, are you?’ the old man shouted, not stirring from his chair in front of the TV. ‘Like a bloody hotel…’
It was true. Ray treated his parents’ suburban semi like a hotel, coming and going without warning, never staying long. But the funny thing was he treated hotels like they were home. The last two