‘That’s what I thought,’ I said. ‘Where did he get them from?’
‘He shagged them all. You could do that in those days.’
The Sixties was another world, a world of terrifying, beautiful women in multicoloured clothes and dark, visionary men on cosmic journeys. It certainly wasn’t much like the worlds I knew: of Granny and Grandpa’s unspoken resentments; or the interiors’ magazines-inspired colour schemes of 99, Queens Road; or even the discreetly wealthy good taste of the Lees. As the searing-knife guitar of ‘Gypsy Eyes’ was replaced with ‘Burning of the Midnight Lamp’s musical shrug detailing the end of a love affair, with Jimi Hendrix making heartbreak sound so very cool by the smiling way he says ‘loneliness is such a drag’, we sat on beanbags opposite one another, the record player between us, staring at the album spinning round and taking it in turns to hold the sleeve.
‘He died, you know,’ I said to Will. ‘I heard a radio programme about it. Apparently he was killed by The Man.’
‘Who is The Man?’
‘Generally it’s the government,’ I said with a sigh, hands behind my head as I sunk deeper into the beanbag. ‘In Jimi Hendrix’s case it was the record company. They wanted to wall him in. Imprison his spirit. You can’t tame a free bird like Jimi.’
‘The ‘suits’,’ said Will, philosophically.
We nodded, solemnly and knowingly. We heard the sound of footsteps on the metal ladder.
‘Is that The Man?’
It was Penny Lee. ‘Hello, you two,’ said Will’s mother, with a bright smile. ‘I thought I’d bring you some supper.’ Somehow she had managed to carry up the ladder with her a tray with plates of baked beans on toast, glasses of apple juice, two bananas and a stack of Bourbons. And she had a dinner party to host. ‘What is that bizarre music?’
‘Jimi Hendrix,’ I said. ‘Do you remember him from when you were young, back in the olden times?’
‘Oh, I was never one for the hit parade,’ she replied with a brisk shake of the head. ‘Do remember to clean your teeth, Will dear. They were rather green the last time I looked.’
For the next hour, from eating supper to listening to Jimi Hendrix to making a compare-and-contrast study of the women on the cover of Electric Ladyland with the ones in David Hamilton’s photographs, we were entirely unaware of the disaster unfolding twenty feet below. It was only when I broke a ruler by whacking it on Will’s head, after which Will told me it was the lucky ruler his elder sister had used to pass her A-levels and I had to go downstairs and confess to my crime, did we discover anything was amiss.
We saw Penny first. She was in the hallway on the telephone, eyebrows resolute as she gave the address of the house to the person on the other end of the line. From within the dining room, we could hear only groans.
‘Mummy, Will’s broken Catherine’s special ruler,’ said Will, poking her in the stomach with one of its jagged edges.
‘Not now, dear,’ she said, in a tone that was, for her, perhaps a little brusque. ‘We have a serious situation to deal with, I’m afraid.’
We went into the dining room. The guests, the women in Monsoon dresses and Liberty scarves and the men in tweed and corduroy jackets and tank tops, were leaning deep into old oak chairs, clutching their stomachs. Nev was laid out on the sofa, prostrate and sweating. At first I thought they had simply drunk too much red wine, as I had seen my parents and their friends do countless times before, but soon I realized this was different. Penny was rushing about making arrangements, and Mum was sitting cross-legged in a chair with a cigarette, but everyone else was in the throes of agony.
‘It was the chicken risotto,’ announced Mum. ‘It’s floored them all.’
‘You seem to be all right,’ I said.
‘It takes more than a chicken to take me down.’
It was only years later that I discovered what had actually happened. Penny had two chickens in the freezer, one for the dinner party and one for Christmas. She had taken them both out, put one back, and momentarily put the thawed chicken where the frozen one had been. The results were much worse than the upset stomach food poisoning usually causes. It was salmonella. Everyone apart from Mum (whose fussy eating habits meant she hadn’t actually had any chicken risotto) and Penny (who was too selfless to fall ill) was affected. Hugh roared and groaned and disappeared into the upstairs bathroom with a bottle of Châteauneuf-du-Pape. One woman went blind for a week. Another became delusional and thought John Inman was sexually abusing her. It was a good thing Mum resisted the urge to write about the whole thing. Penny was a top-ranking civil servant in the Department of Health at the time.
I leaned over the sofa and looked at Nev, his glasses steamed up and his tight, dry lips taking on a worrying blue tint. ‘Are you all right, Nev?’ I asked, but he merely reached a thin hand out towards mine and made a rumbling noise.
‘Honestly, trust Nev to get it worse than the rest of them,’ said Mum, as I leaned over my father and wondered if this would be the last time I would see him alive. She touched up her lipstick before standing in the middle of the room and announcing, ‘He’ll do anything for attention.’
An ambulance pulled up outside silently, its ominous flashing lights heralding the seriousness of the situation. Nev, unmoving, was raised onto a stretcher, and a utilitarian red blanket was pulled tightly and neatly over him. He looked like an Action Man in trouble. Mum told me she was going to travel with Nev to the hospital but that there was no need for me to go too. Ambulances came for two more guests, and the rest crawled off in various directions. With Hugh locked up in the bathroom, Penny was left on her own.
‘Oh dear,’ she said, still with a nervous smile, stacking up plates and putting them in neat piles next to the sink. ‘Dear me.’
‘It wasn’t your fault, Mummy,’ said Will, fiddling with a wine glass until he dropped it onto the floor with a yelp.
‘I rather think it was,’ said Penny, magicking a dustpan and brush and sweeping away the shattered glass. ‘It was frightfully silly of me to take the two chickens out of the freezer in the first place. I don’t know what I was thinking.’
‘I wouldn’t worry, I said, rifling through a box of After Eights on the table until I found one of the little paper sleeves still containing a chocolate mint. ‘Nev will be fine. It’ll be like the time we were in Richmond Park and he fell out of a tree and landed on his bum. He couldn’t sit down for a week, but after that he was right as rain. I very much doubt it will have any lasting effects.’
Nev almost died. He was so severely ill that he slept for eighteen hours a day, and the act of getting up and going to the toilet exhausted him so much that he had to go straight back to bed again. That night, as he lay feverish in a hospital bed, Will and I played a game of peashooter tennis, listened to Jimi Hendrix do his fifteen-minute version of Voodoo Chile, and went to sleep.
Nev returned home a week later. It was Tom who broke the news, one afternoon when he came in from school. ‘Nev’s back,’ he said, after opening the fridge and glugging orange juice from the carton. ‘And he doesn’t look good.’
Mum was out that afternoon, interviewing a celebrity, so I crept up to our parents’ bedroom. Nev was lying in bed, motionless. He was extremely thin, and without his glasses his face took on an incomplete, mole-like aspect. The room was hot and airless. On the dressing table were three aluminium tubes with little labels on them.
‘What are these?’ I said to Nev, holding up one of the tubes.
In a barely perceptible whisper he said what sounded like ‘I oo’.
‘You what?’
He tried again. ‘My poo.’
‘Yuck!’ I dropped the tube, and for a horrible moment I thought the top was going to come off and send Nev’s diseased