By

Ryan Lee

*******************

There's a little iron bench in a park close to my mum's house. I've always thought of it as the kind of bench where a man might sit and wonder how he got here. I don't mean literally of course - I mean why here? Ever since I was a kid I've seen old men sitting on that bench, usually with a grizzled Jack Russel swaying at their feet, probably remembering the days when they chased girls and chased sticks and wondering where it all went to.

I never thought of that bench as the kind of place where you might get hit by a revelation. There's every chance of being hit by a frisbee or a hard rubber ball ( invariably pursued by a gormless dog weighing about the same as a sofa ), but I was secure in the belief that any undiscovered truths about myself would dawn on me gradually, kindly; rumours would leak out of my subconscious until it was too late to deny anything and too late to cause me any real anxiety.

But I was wrong. Sometimes the truth comes at you with all the grace and subtlety of a Great Dane lolloping after a rubber ball.

This all sounds like a big Jesus thing but that's not what happened to me. When my turn came I sat on the bench and faced up to the fact that I was in a job I no longer wanted. It wasn't for the lack of success - I have always been a success, and ten years of failure can never take that away from me - it was because I didn't know how to separate the important things in my life from pop music.

So if I am a hero of yours I think it's time that I budge up and make room on the bench for your sorry arse. You see, even if you were a fan for ten years, even if you bought the tape and wore the tee-shirt, drove your car with Pheonix rattling through your speakers, lost your virginity to someone you met at a Flamboyant Gesture concert, read the headlines when they happened and finally danced your awkward thirty-something dance at our memorable last show; even if you were there through all those good times and great oldies, you don't know the half of it yet. There are some things you should know about me, things I never sang about until now.

Here we go then.

One-two-three-four...

ONE

Less than three weeks into that torrid and immortal decade I was forced to place the following advertisement in the local free paper:

I received just one reply, unless you also count the mad woman who wanted to know if the Hoover was still for sale. I spoke briefly on the telephone to a young man called Elliot, told him who we were and what sort of stuff we liked, and arranged to do an informal audition at his place. For all our sakes I purposely omitted the following three facts:

1: We had yet to perform our first concert.

2: We had yet to perform with a real drummer.

3: We were shite.

*******

If I was making this up I'd tell you that we used to hang out somewhere groovy like a jazz cafe or an underground blues club, but I'm not making it up and there was nothing like that in our town. We started meeting in a pub called the Duke of Wellington; meeting as a group I mean, because all of us were regulars before the band was formed but we each had our own little patch and shared only a basic awareness of the others. We came together as a result of a card I pinned to the notice board in the Duke's foyer, sandwiched between details of the next fishing trip and the telephone number of a local prostitute. It was a miracle that anyone saw it at all let alone enough fledgling musicians to lay the foundations for an institution. But come together we did; young, hopeful, naive enough to believe that our tentative group would prove as perennial and unchanging as Brian May's hair.

Three weeks later we lost our drummer. His name was Frank something or other. I never got the chance to find out much else about him other than the fact that he was addicted to fruit machines and smelled a bit.

Frank left the band on the evening of our fifth rehearsal session. I was already beginning to doubt Frank's commitment to Flamboyant Gesture, largely because he had failed to show up at any of the previous four sessions. This presented a number of problems for the rest of the band, not least of them was the question of when and how to start playing if there was nobody to say one-two-three-four.

Ray's answer was to ignore the counting thing and simply yell, "NOW!" One by one the rest of us would jump in after him, only occasionally in the correct order. Every song started this way and stopping it again was like bringing a runaway truck to a halt. The method we adopted was to stop when you felt like it. The result was that the ending of each song came about by a process of disintegration as bits of it gradually fell off, leaving only an unaccompanied bass solo thumping out the final few bars.

But I was still hopeful that Frank would catch a belated dose of enthusiasm and join us at Ray's dad's lock-up for the fifth rehearsal. It was early days yet, and we were still getting used to the idea that we weren't strangers in a noisy pub anymore.

Ray Myers, lead guitar and occasional vocals, was one of the Friday night boys, the aggressive, Kouros-soaked trouble-makers who gathered at the pool table to swap stories about Benidorm and building jobs in the South of England. On the night we lost Frank I found Ray listening to one of his friends describe a particularly ferocious encounter with a rival in a kebab shop. There was so much blood about, the story went, it looked like someone had dropped a stick of dynamite into the chilli sauce.

"Are you ready Ray?"

Ray gave me a look of faint disdain."Ready for what?"

Beside me the bass player Paul Smith was fidgeting and blinking in that nervous way of his. Ray's Friday night boys represented the back-of-the-class element that Paul had always lived in fear of.

"Practice," I said."Are the others here?"

"Megan's with the freaks. Larry's over there-" Ray nodded over to the bar, where Larry was chatting up a ruthlessly attractive blond and her plain friend. He was wearing a Metz baseball cap turned back to front.

"What about whatsisname, the drummer?"

"Fruit machine."

"Did he say if he was coming or not?"

Ray shrugged."I can soon find another drummer if he doesn't."

The significance of this simple statement was overlooked at the time, but it marked the moment when Ray began to take control of the band. Later, when he started hitting people, his position became more obvious.

Paul and I collected our singer Megan Thomas from the snug, where she and her fellow vegetarian terrorists were plotting something or other. We picked up Larry on the way out. He was still with the blond girl and her plain friend, only now his baseball cap had magically transformed into a French beret. It was going to take me a long time to get used to Larry's bizarre habit of switching hats in mid-conversation.

We piled into Ray's dirty Transit van. Larry, Paul and myself had to crouch in the back along with our instruments, about two hundred litres of trade emulsion, a set of ladders and three huge tubs of tile grout. Megan rode in the front of course, after insisting that Ray spread a sheet of polythene over the seat so that she wouldn't get paint over her favourite antique Levis.

"Wait!" I called as Ray started the engine."We've forgotten whatsisname, the drummer!"

I ran back into the pub and found whatsisname at the fruit machine, studiously ramming coins into the slot with alarming consistency. He didn't have his drum kit with him, I noticed.

"Frank?"

He just grunted, annoyed at the distraction.

"We're off now. Are you coming?"

"Cheating trollop," he muttered at the machine, then turned his head and gave me a blank look."Jimmy," he said at last.

"We're off to rehearsals. Are you coming?"

"Mmm, might follow in a bit," he said, and turned his concentration back to the fruit machine.

I didn't see him again for ten years.

*********

The house was a folly in one of the better suburbs, possibly a converted church standing in the kind of grounds that those of us from the poor side of town would confuse with a park. We went along in Ray's van and narrowly avoided colliding with a goat wandering across the drive. We got out of the van, complaining noisily about the paint on our jeans, but the goat just stared at us with expressive eyes and a faintly smiling face. Megan made a cooing noise and waddled over to stoke it; the goat decided it had seen enough and strolled away.

I rapped on the door four times with the giant iron knocker but the house appeared lifeless.

"What's his name again?" Megan asked.

"Elliot."

"Is that his first name or his last name?"

I shrugged."Dunno. Last name, I expect."

Ray was staring at the leaded windows upstairs, looking suspiciously like he was thinking about throwing a stone."It will be his last name if we've come all this way for-"

The door opened with an arthritic groan, and standing there was a stocky young man of about nineteen, his muscular arms bulging from the sleeves of a Tom Petty tee-shirt. He raked back an untidy fringe of thick brown hair and studied us with a kind of calm sadness.

"Elliot?"

"Yes," he said after a discernible pause for thought."I'm Elliot."

"Jimmy Connor," I said."We spoke on the phone. This is Ray, Paul, Megan, and the one in the deerstalker is our keyboard player, Larry."

We went upstairs to a long bare room with real wooden beams and rough whitewashed walls. In the centre, surrounded by coffee cups, empty beer cans and two ashtrays overflowing with spliff butts, was a gorgeous Pearl drum kit. Clear-skinned snares and tom-toms and symbols and high hats blossomed around the bass drum like the petals of some exotic giant flower. It was a beautiful, beautiful exhibit. I didn't even need to hear him play because I had already made up my mind.

"Do you own this house, Elliot?" I asked. He didn't hear me. He was watching Paul and the others closely as they examined the drum kit. He didn't look worried exactly, more curious than anything, as if he was picking up vibrations, getting a feel for them from the way they were reacting to his kit. He was paying particular attention to Paul's reaction, as if he instinctively recognised Paul as a bass player.

"Elliot?" Again he didn't turn his head, so I touched him lightly on the shoulder. When he looked at me it was with something soulful and apologetic in his eyes.

"I have a hearing problem," he said.

"Oh...Does it, you know, affect your playing?"

He smiled benignly and shook his head."I have some hearing. I fill the gaps in by lip-reading."

"So how do you hear the music?"

"Pardon?"

"I said-"

"I was just kidding," Elliot said."I don't hear it exactly, not like I did when I had full hearing, but I know what it sounds like. I sort of absorb the vibrations through my skin." He paused and tilted his head as if he was listening to a sound beyond the frequency of my untrained hearing."But it's easier just to turn the stereo up."

I burst into sudden laughter. Elliot smiled in an approving way.

"So what happened to your last drummer?"

"First drummer," I said, guiding Elliot over to his kit. I handed him a pair of sticks as he sat down on the stool."You're our last drummer."

************

Elliot was in the band. He arrived at Ray's dad's lock-up the very next evening, his drum kit fitting magically into his Mini Cooper, and spent an hour or so setting them up and fiddling around until he was satisfied with the arrangement.

"The acoustics are a bit flat," he said when we were ready to begin.

Ray gave a professional hum of agreement, then turned to me and said loudly,"And he'd know, right, fucking Quasimodo?"

"One-two-three-four..."

***********

"Did Frank ever say why he was leaving?" Larry asked. The question surprised me, not least because it was May and Frank had been absent now for the best part of five months. What surprised me the most was that nobody but Elliot had ever thought to ask the question before.

"Artistic differences," I said.

"Such as?"

"He thought he was an artist. I thought different."

We were in the Duke - just Larry, Megan, and me. Ray had taken his girlfriend Katrina to the pictures and Paul was at home helping his mother assemble a television cabinet. Nobody knew where Elliot was. His private life was still a relatively private affair.

"Seems funny that's all," Larry said.

"What does?"

Larry shrugged."Just to leave the way he did. Just like that."

"Like what?"

"Just like that, like he did."

I took a deep breath and decided to get this out of the way once and for all."He didn't leave. I sacked him."

"Sacked him?" Megan echoed. She was staring at me with curious astonishment."Just like that?"

"Is Tommy Cooper in the house?" I asked sarcastically."It sounds like it to me."

"I didn't think you had it in you," Larry said quietly."I mean, I don't think I could sack a bloke. Not just like...not without getting someone else to do it or sending him a letter or something."

I chewed on that for a moment. In truth it hadn't been all that difficult to get rid of Frank, largely because I never actually told him that he was sacked, not in so many words. Even so I didn't feel haunted by my actions. I made a decision for the good of the band, and it turned out to be the correct one.

I looked at Larry and Megan just then. We felt settled enough with Elliot keeping goal but there was bound to come a time when one of us began to show signs of weakness. I wondered if I could do to a friend what I did to Frank. It would take a ruthless streak to kick a friend out of a poxy pub rock band just because they were off key or out of time. I didn't have a ruthless streak. Just an ambition.

Later that evening Ray came into the pub and delivered two incredible pieces of news.

"Guess what?" he said, plonking himself on the only stool available, leaving Katrina to go find her own."I'm going to be a dad."

"A what?" I asked dumbly.

"A dad," Larry said helpfully."A father. It's like a mother with a proper job."

Megan responded to that by tugging the peak of Larry's Celtic cap over his eyes. Larry then nudged Megan's shoulder, sending a slop of beer into her lap. She giggled and called him a tosser, and he whispered something back that I didn't catch and no doubt wasn't meant to. I didn't think they were shagging yet but they were getting awfully close. There wasn't enough going on in my own love life for me to feel anything other than resentment and self-pity. Larry had boyish charm and his mild eccentricities, such as his bewildering array of hats and the small flask of tea he brought along to all our rehearsals, Ray had his rough good looks and that mysterious touch of workman appeal, whereas I was one of life's B-sides, a nondescript album track destined to end up in the same basket as the K-Tel collections and pan-pipe compilation tapes. Only rock and roll could save me.

"Do you know where babies come from, Jimmy?" Megan said. Her green eyes gently mocked me over the rim of a pint mug which had an inch of black slurry at the bottom.

"I know, I know, I'm just..."

"Just a virgin," Larry said in a conspiratorial whisper. He and Ray were smirking in that know-it-all way of the sexually active. I wasn't a virgin as it happened, but then again I was hardly what you would call rampant. My only sexual encounter had been too fraught with tension and paranoia to recall with any kind of nostalgia. I remembered little more than the trepidation and the adrenalin and the short burst of furious action at the end, much like my O-levels and my only school fight. I put my shortage of sexual adventure down to spending too much time with Paul and getting excited over all the wrong things, such as Queen singles on Japanese import and what would be number one in the Friday Rock Show's annual chart of most requested rock tracks.

Katrina (or Kat, as we all came to know her) came back to our table dragging a heavy captain's chair behind her. I liked Katrina immediately. She was small and fragile-looking, with short, boyish black hair and huge, roaming dark eyes, the kind of eyes you normally see peeking nervously over the top of a furry pouch on some wildlife documentary.

"Get the drinks in, Kat," Ray said, slapping a twenty pound note on the table."Same again? Wet the baby's head?"

The three of us laughed in disbelief. Katrina's eyes moved from one face to the next. Ray was honestly perplexed.

"What?"

"She's pregnant," Larry said.

"Der, you don't say, Sherlock."

"And you're sending her to the bar to carry five pints plus shorts?"

"I said fuck all about shorts, Larry."

We were all laughing now, except for Katrina, who was smiling hesitantly as if she hadn't quite decided if we were laughing with her or laughing at her.

Ray gave in and went to the bar, returning with beer and a large vodka for everyone. Then he delivered his second big surprise.

"We've got a gig."

**************

I went straight to Paul's house after the pub, and we sat in his bedroom playing records. His bedroom was much the same as mine - single bed, redundant Commodore computer, black and white portable television, white melamine wardrobes, vinyl records, Dixon hi-fi, selection of posters on the walls - only his was much neater and didn't have that socky smell about it. We talked about the forthcoming concert in tones of earnest concern, only occasionally - and daringly - allowing ourselves to consider the possibility that it might actually be quite exciting. At one point his mum came in with two cups of warm milk and asked Paul to turn the records down a bit. I was suddenly swept back to when we were fifteen and sitting in this same room, on the same bed, probably listening to the same Queen album, angsting privately about Karen Greaves's party on Friday night.

"What do you think we should call the first album?" Paul said. He was waiting for me to fan his cinders into fire, which was what I'd been doing ever since our mothers forced us into reluctant friendship at the age of seven. It took me years to get used to having him trailing around my feet like a loose shoelace, and I don't think I really got to know him until his father, a local milkman, hanged himself when Paul was just thirteen. At the time Paul came in for a lot of casual cruelty from the kids at school, such as morons asking him if it was true that his father had left a suicide note sticking out of a milk bottle, and it was me he turned to when it all got too much for his narrow shoulders to bare.

"We should pick a single-word title or an everyday phrase," I said."Nothing too pretentious."

He agreed soberly and sipped at the warm milk."I've got a Flake downstairs," he said."Do you want half to crumble into your milk?"

I said okay, and when he left the room I fell back onto the bed and giggled with embarrassment. I promised myself that if I ever became famous, no matter how many drunken interviews I gave, no matter how many female journalists I slept with, I would never, repeat never, tell a living soul about what had just transpired.

***************

The birthday party was to be held in the damp, dingy hall where Paul and I had marched self-importantly with the Boys' Brigade many years before. I remembered the acoustics as being somewhat fiesty: You could slap someone across the face or the bare legs and the sound would ricochet dangerously back and forth like one of those tiny manic rubber balls we used to throw around. We got there early - about two in the afternoon - because we were nervous and had nothing else to do ( none of us had proper jobs except for Ray and Larry, who had both taken the day off with identical complaints ), but we couldn't set up and practice straight away because a local drama group were rehearsing badly on the small stage.

"What time did you say the party started?" Larry asked for the third or forth time. We were sitting at the back of the hall, bored and edgy.

"Half-four," Ray muttered."Are you as deaf as him or what?" He cocked a thumb at Elliot, who was fiddling with his hearing aid. His face was studious and pinched as he tried to block out our drivel and concentrate on what the actors were saying.

"It seems a bit early to me."

"Larry, what do you want me to do about it?"

There was a loud cough from the stage. The actors were looking disapprovingly at us over their scripts.

"Would you mind keeping the noise down please?" a man in a dog collar asked."It's a pretty important scene we're trying to perfect."

"Yeah, sorry, Vicar."

"Thankyou...and I'm not really a vicar."

Ray eyed the man with jaded sarcasm."And I'm not really sorry."

The actors finished their rehearsal ( rather early, I suspect) and we went about the little ritual of setting up our gear. There was some confusion about where we should stand. Obviously Elliot needed to be at the back, and Megan at the front, but where the rest of us fitted in wasn't quite so clear. We were struck by a crisis of confidence. This was all very different from messing around in Ray's dad's lock-up. So it was only a draughty church hall we were playing, and the people we'd be playing to were only dead-head friends of some birthday girl that only Ray seemed to know, but tell us that. I was suddenly certain that on the count of four we would all just freeze and stare vacantly at the grinning faces of the crowd.

"Do you want to do one?" Ray asked. I didn't like the uncertainty in his voice. Back at the lock up he would have told us what we were doing, given Elliot the nod, and we would have obeyed without argument."Might help loosen us up."

We looked doubtfully at each other. I shrugged at Elliot, who lowered his eyes and twiddled his drumsticks.

"What about Walking On Sunshine?" Ray suggested."Megan?"

Megan looked up worriedly."I sing that one."

"Der..."

"Well can't we start with one of yours?" She shot Larry a pleading glance.

"What about Back of My Hand?" Larry said reluctantly.

Ray flicked him a dangerous look."What about the back of my hand, Larry?"

Larry huffed but said nothing. Ray was cooking a bit now, and we were all feeling better for it. Even Paul, whose face had been hanging like a wet flag, brightened noticeably.

"We're doing Walking On Sunshine," Ray said decisively. "Ready Elliot? Elliot!"

"One-two-three-four..."

It was a good number to kick us off. The lively intro went through us like a current, feeding off the adrenalin and nervous energy in our bodies. Megan began stiffly but by the second chorus she was almost as natural as she was at the lock-up. I felt the awkwardness slip from my shoulders, and when I glanced across at Paul I saw that his eyes were large and round and perfectly still.

We were midway through the practice session when a small group of women arrived and began to lay out the buffet. I should have been suspicious when I saw the jelly, but it wasn't until the ventriloquist arrived that it finally dawned on me that this wasn't a coming of age party.

"How old is she, Ray?" I demanded to know. The others gathered behind me in a curiously timid display of artistic indignation.

"Six," Ray said. He spread his arms innocently."Didn't I say?"

***************

So we were the support act at a child's birthday party, playing second fiddle to Uncle Nobby and Snappy the Crocodile, but I suppose it was still higher up the bill than we'd been the day before.

We went to the pub, partly to steady our nerves, partly to dilute the humiliation, then passed a few joints around just to be on the safe side. After that we went back and played five songs to an audience of enthusiastic and occasionally confused six year old girls in pastel coloured party dresses.

Walking On Sunshine was the opening number, followed by Psycho Killer with Ray on lead vocals. We then launched into School's Out, which brought the girls clapping and jumping to the front of the stage, and a belting rendition of California Dreaming. This song would stay with us for ten years, through changing times and changing faces, but I don't think we ever performed it like we did that afternoon. We were brilliant, full of guts and energy and soft drugs.

For our final number, Megan sang a sweetly soulful song by Peter Frampton, Baby I love Your Way, but it lost most of its emotional impact because we had to keep stopping and starting again while the girls played musical chairs.

***************

By Christmas of that first year we were performing live at least once a week. These weren't big shows. Far from it, in fact. The kind of gigs we played usually happened on Tuesday nights in one pub or another, and amounted to a twenty minute shot at fame while the landlord marked the quiz papers. Occasionally, and only because the crowd happened to be largely indifferent to our presence, we would take these opportunities to try out a few of our own songs.

She's Not To Be Trusted was my very first effort, written when I still had to look at the little picture of Bert Weedon to make sure that I was holding down the correct strings. We sang it in the Duke on New Year's Eve, arm in arm, sloshed on a cocktail of booze and soft drugs and seasonal sentimentality, our very own Auld Lang Syne.

Nobody declared that gathering together on New Year's Eve would henceforth become a tradition. We just did it because by the end of that first year together we were almost friends instead of relative strangers. And we did it the year after because we had done it the year before. That's pretty much indicative of the band in its later period, the period between the bomb blast and the struggle to cope with the shocking after-effects, right up to the time that Cole and Warren Pepper blew us up from the inside. We limped on after each disabling blow because we had done it after the one before that. It was expected of us. We were an institution, a tradition, and we couldn't be broken no matter how pointless and outdated we became.

At the end of the evening, when everyone was kissing and shaking hands and wondering when the first fight would start, Ray threw his arm around my neck and grinned drunkenly at my worried face.

"So, Jimmy," he said."Are you a bastard yet?"

At that point he belched wetly, crippling us both with adolescent hysterics, and I never got a chance to ponder over his strange question. I didn't really think about it again until I found myself sitting on a park bench at a time when I should have been onstage in a football stadium, feeling like a clown who's had one too many custard pies slammed in his face, exhausted by a tradition that was no longer relevant to me.

If he had been there with me that day I would have said yes, Ray, I'm a total bastard. Now how do I stop?

He would have told me to stick my fingers down my throat, I'm certain of it. Which, metaphorically speaking, is exactly what I'm doing.

In the same January week that I began a long and undistinguished career as a postman, a conspicuously pregnant Katrina ( or 'fat Kat' as she was affectionately referred to) came along to our gig at the Railway Inn but left before we'd even unloaded the gear out of the van.

"She's got back ache," Ray told us as we were setting up."They get like that."

"Maybe she shouldn't have carried Elliot's bass drum all by herself," Larry said. He and Ray snorted with laughter.

"Are you sure she's going to be alright?" Megan asked."Should she be on her own, do you think?"

"She's having a baby, Megan. It's not like she's poorly or anything. Besides, our kid and his wife'll look in on her."

The our kid in question was Ray's older brother, John. I had my doubts about his ability to take care of a pot plant let alone a pregnant girlfriend. I could only hope that his wife had more sense. And more teeth, come to that.

Later that evening, as were about to go on, Ray got a phone call at the bar. He came back looking slightly distracted.

"They've taken her to hospital," he said as he shouldered his guitar."They seem to think I should go with her."

"Well..." Megan began, then looked at me to take over.

"It's a pretty important show," I said."Will a couple of hours make much difference?"

Megan recoiled from me and did all but make the sign of the cross on her chest."She needs him!" She looked pleadingly at Ray."Kat needs you, Ray!"

"She needs doctors and shit, Megan. What does she need me for? I don't know anything about babies."

"For support, dummy!"

"Look, Kat's going to have a baby tonight whether I'm there or not, but nobody else is going to play my guitar parts except me."

"The show must go on," Larry said. I think he had meant it to sound tongue in cheek but instead it came out like a solemn declaration of what we were about. As we moved to our positions I caught Ray's eyes and nodded to him. He winked back at me, and as Elliot counted us into the first number, we were both grinning in that dazed way of people who can't quite believe what they're doing. The fact that Ray was more concerned with not letting the band down than being at his girlfriend's side while she gave birth to their child struck me as being a perfectly natural reaction. I had yet to be faced with such a sacrifice but I was nonetheless prepared to make it when it came. We were going to be famous, and everything else in our lives would have to accept second place right now.

The gig went well, one of the best we had that year, but the crowd were unfamiliar with live music in their particular environment and didn't receive us too well. The biggest cheer of the night came just before the last song - Harvest For The World - when Ray's brother, waving his arms wildly at the back of the room, bellowed:"Our kid! It's a girl!"

*************

We stripped the stage area and bundled everything into Ray's van, including ourselves, and hurtled towards the hospital. Strange that after seeming so relaxed and relatively unimpressed by the whole affair, Ray should now develop a sense of occasion.

Surprisingly the night staff at the maternity unit weren't all that pleased when a hyped-up rock and roll band covered in eggshell trade emulsion came bounding onto their ward. The sister briskly ushered everyone back into the corridor, then returned a few moments later, as if it was an after thought, to ask what we wanted.

"I've got a baby," Ray said.

"With you?" the sister inquired. She was facing us with her hands on her hips, giving us the kind of warning look that said she had bounced out much bigger boys and girls in her time, and if we gave her any lip she would redirect the lot of us to casualty.

"Erm, no, not with me," Ray muttered."It's my girlfriend's baby."

The sister nodded brusquely."And what's her name?"

"We haven't thought of one yet."

A round of titters were instantly hushed by a single admonishing glance from the sister. She then fixed Ray with a beleaguered look."You must be Ray Myers, eh? You should have been here hours ago, Ray."

Ray, shamefaced, whispered,"Yes, miss," and Larry had to walk away as the giggles got the better of him.

"You'd better come and see your son then," the sister told him with a forgiving smile.

"Son?"

The sister was already walking away. Ray turned around and beamed at us.

"Son," I echoed. Megan kissed him and gave him a hug. Ray went to kiss me, laughed and shook my hand instead.

"I've got a son," he said, his voice beginning to crack."I'll fucking kill our kid."

****************

"He weighed in at eight pounds and four ounces," Ray told me as we drove home in the van. Everyone else had gone home in a taxi an hour or so before ( after the ward sister had supervised a silent, tip-toes parade past Kat's bed ) but Ray wanted me to stay behind."You should have seen him, Jimmy. He's just like a little potato or something."

"I did see him," I said."And eight pounds is fucking big for a potato, Ray."

Ray laughed self-consciously."You know what I mean." He glanced at me across the gloom of the cab. His eyes picked up light from somewhere and seemed to glow with fierce happiness."I've got all these thoughts about him, all this stuff in my head, but I don't know how to say it." He turned his attention back to the road, silent and thoughtful for a few moments."He's like...he's my son, Jimmy. He's my son, and I can't get over it."

He dropped me off at my house but as I searched my pocket for my keys I noticed that he was still waiting at the garden gate with the engine running. The night was crisp cold and clear. The seeds of a hard frost glittered on the black pavement, reminding me that I had to be at work in less than two hours. I went back to the van, my hands digging in my pockets for warmth. The window was down but Ray was staring straight ahead at the empty street.

"I like that song you wrote: If You've Ever Had A Dream. I know it's not about me, but it could be, it could be, Jimmy."

If You've Ever Had A Dream was a melancholy acoustic ballad which I had originally written for Ray to sing, but he had difficulty with the key and the tempo and the words and a lot of other stuff, so after a couple of attempts he handed it over to Megan. I was chilled the first time I heard her sing it. I almost stepped off the stage so that I could stand at the back of the room and watch her perform. She was magic. I think I fell in love with her for those three and a half minutes.

"I didn't know you wanted a kid that badly," I said.

"I don't. I didn't, I mean. I thought Kat and me were like Larry and Megan, just shagging for the fun of it. But we're not like that. We're different now."

"Different in what way?"

His gaze drifted as he tried to articulate whatever this big mystery about fatherhood was doing to him inside. I thought that if he patronised me by insisting it would all become clear when I grew up and had a kid of my own I would quite possibly thump him in the mouth.

Eventually Ray's eyes settled on mine, and I realised that I had seriously underestimated the depths of his intelligence.

"We go on," he said."Kat and me could die tomorrow, but we'll still go on. We've left something behind."

Like making a record, I thought. I could dig that.

I said goodnight and went inside. Instead of going to bed I sat down at the kitchen table and drew up a shortlist of reserve guitarists. When it was done I folded it up and slipped it into the secret pocket in my wallet.

************

I'll tell you what I was thinking about when I met Annie that sunsplashed afternoon in Leeds. I was thinking about nipping into Boots the chemist to buy a bottle of paracetamol and perhaps sneak a look at their range of exotic condoms. Strange I should remember that, but then I remember a lot of things about Annie that a sane man would have forgotten long before now.

So there I was, sitting on a bench outside a bookshop, half listening to a young female busker with long hair under a beret singing a Beatles song, when I decided to bite the bullet and buy some condoms for the blind date that Larry had sprung on me only a few hours before. I tried to produce a mental picture of the girl from Larry's suspiciously vague description of her but my inspiration was drawn from dubious porn magazines and forbidden fantasies about Amazon women dressed as lion tamers.

As the minutes past I found myself thinking less about the perils and possibilities of a blind date than I did about the busker. Megan was a great singer. When she sang Too Late she sounded just like Carole King, but that was why she would never attract much attention other than the dopey adoration of a few teenage boys who wished she was their girlfriend. I tried to encourage her to develop a stage presence to compensate for the nice but ordinary quality of her voice but her lack of effort and progress was beginning to frustrate me.

The busker's voice was clear and sweet and yet she kept throwing little surprises by varying her pitch and tone when I was least expecting it. There was something random and quirky about the way she would emphasize her northern accent on some lyrics and sing others with an American country twang. It was always interesting, always changing.

I went to throw a few coins into her guitar case by means of smoothing my introduction, but catching my first clear sight of the singer's face made me halt with an abruptness that threw her concentration. She found her way back into the song but continued to watch me carefully, obviously on her guard.

"Annie?" I said when she finished the song."It's Annie isn't it?"

She looked at me oddly, then pulled a tiny pair of John Lennon glasses from her shirt pocket and put them on.

"Hey, it's you!" she laughed."Er, from the bakery."

"Jimmy."

"Jimmy, right."

"And you worked in the fruit shop next door."

She knew that of course, but what she didn't know is that between the ages of sixteen and eighteen I purchased the entire export crop of several small fruit-producing nations so that each day I might steal a few moments from her life.

"You liked fruit," she said, gazing up at me with gentle amusement, and I felt instantly stupid and thrilled at the same time.

I sat cross-legged on the pavement beside her and we chatted about what we had been doing over the years. I found out that she had busked her way across North America and played in such fabled places as New Orleans, Memphis, Chicago, Detroit, and had even performed an impromptu duet with Bryan Adams in a Vancouver nightclub. I told her about the band but I didn't tell her about the time we supported Uncle Nobby and Snappy the Crocodile in the Boys' Brigade hall.

"I'd like to come and see you play," she said."Have you got a standing gig?"

We had recently acquired one, as it turned out - every Thursday night at the Blue Whale, between the quiz and the disco. "No, not as such. But I can give you a call the next time we play the city."

She said that would be cool, and scribbled her telephone number on the back of a card promoting a regular folk-rock night at one of the city's most prestigious venues. Annie Lawrence was forth on the bill.

"Is this you?" I asked, trying to mask just how impressed and envious I was.

She leaned over to look at the card. A subtle scent of patchouli went through me like a ghost, stirring up a little cloud of memories that were sad and funny and still young enough to hurt a bit.

"Oh yeah, that's me. Wednesday night. Will you come?"

Should I bring someone? is what I should have asked. Should I hope? Instead I just said yes, probably, if wasn't busy with the band. Again she smiled that smile that said she knew I would come, just like she knew who sent those daft but touching Valentine cards and also placed the mystery dedication on the Love In The Afternoon slot, as if she knew full well that she could play my heart like a record.

And of course I had another reason for wanting to see her play.

**************

The blind date went much better than I expected. Her name was Alison Stead, and there was nothing exotic or intimidating about her at all. In fact for the first half hour or so I was actually quite disappointed with her. I felt like a kid who tears open a tempting looking Christmas gift only to discover a bundle of new school clothes inside. She was certainly a take home to mum type - small, short brown hair, clean teeth, polite, friendly - but not exactly the first biscuit you'd snatch out of the box. A resentful part of me knew that I needed Alison Stead, or someone like her, just like that kid knows he needs new school clothes, but it didn't change the fact that I had prayed for toys.

We had a perfectly nice evening and by the end of it I was interested enough to ask her out again. She said yes, and I was strangely thrilled. To paraphrase Springsteen, she was no beauty but yeah, she was alright.

I took Paul to see Annie in Leeds the following Wednesday. I had thought about skipping a week just to make me appear cool and devil-may-care, but there was always a danger that in Annie's eyes this would translate as cold and couldn't-give-a-frig.

"You said folk music was for tossers," Paul remarked as we queued at the basement nightclub. A couple in front turned their heads and regarded us with snooty disdain.

"I meant those songs about potato rustlers getting transported to Australia on prison ships. Folk rock's okay. Neil Young, the Eagles, Steve Earl, that sort of stuff."

"Steve Earl's country."

"Country's folk. American folk. Same thing."

"What should I say if we talk to someone?"

"What?"

Paul looked at me, blinking steadily."I mean, should I say that I'm in a band?"

"Can do."

"A folk rock band?"

"Why lie?"

He shrugged and stuffed his hands in his pockets."It might help."

"Help get a shag you mean?"

Paul nodded reluctantly.

"It doesn't matter, you know. I wouldn't worry about it."

He gave a resentful tut."You don't have to. I'm nearly twenty three, Jimmy. I shouldn't be a-" he glanced around, his voice dropping to a whisper,"-virgin."

"I know lots of people older than you."

"Oh yeah, like who?"

Like Donald Duck and the Pope, I thought, but thankfully the queue started moving and I didn't have to say anything.

We paid our money and went downstairs to a dimly lit basement. The place was small and intimate, the kind of venue known to attract massive stars who wanted to pretend they were nobodies again. The stage area was shrouded by a heavy black curtain, in front of which, illuminated by a single shaft of silvery light, was a lone Dobro guitar on a stand.

"Wow," Paul said softly."I love this place."

"Gives me the tingles," I said, and Paul grinned and nodded."We'll be playing this place next year, mark my words."

We stood at the bar and drank bottled beer while the first three acts performed. Two were male solo singers who should have teamed up and saved the audience the trouble of having to listen to them twice, but the third act, a band who wandered laxly onto the stage to no announcement, were just about the best non-recording outfit I'd ever seen. I watched them with a mixture of breathless enthusiasm and furious envy as they played five original songs, said thankyou, goodnight, then put their instruments down and walked off. Two of them came directly to the bar while a third, the singer, simply strolled off stage and left the building.

"That's cool," Paul said, shaking his head in admiration."I mean, that's really cool."

There was a long interval, during which we tried to engage two folk rock chicks in casual conversation leading to meaningful sex. It started indifferently and went swiftly downhill from there. I was doing okay - I usually do when I've drunk too much to care - but Paul was mumbly and evasive, which left me trying to entertain both of them. I thought briefly of suggesting that the three of us go back to my place, where there was plenty of ironing for the spare one to be getting on with, but even at the most desperate of times I don't have the guts to activate that self-destruct button. Ray uses it to good effect but me, I just cling on in there until I'm scraped off like so much dog shit.

Eventually, bored and out of polite conversation, they left us.

"Well?" Paul asked me, his eyelashes twitching."Are we in or what?"

"Ladies and gentlemen," a voice over the PA cut in."Please welcome Annie Lawrence."

Annie stepped onto the stage carrying an acoustic guitar and a stool. She was dressed in faded jeans and a long baggy jumper.

Paul looked at me."Isn't that-"

"Yeah."

"Didn't you-"

"Yeah, shush now. Listen to her, she's great."

"Evening," she said, ducking into the mike. She arranged the stool and sat down, resting the guitar across her lap."This is a song I wrote in Memphis. It's called Hey, I'm in Memphis."

There was a ripple of laughter. Paul tugged at my arm and leaned over."She's been to Memphis."

I knew that. So did everybody else in here.

Annie played four upbeat contemporary songs ( the best of which, I have to say, was Hey, I'm in Memphis) and received a rousing ovation from the audience. Her reaction was coy and surprised, which no doubt endeared her to the largely sensible, thirty-something audience. Ray had a habit of punching the air and yelling 'Give it up yer bastards!' whenever we got a cheer.

As Annie was leaving the stage, I suddenly remembered something and steered Paul quickly out of the club.

"Why didn't you stay?" he asked when we were outside."I thought you and her..."

I remembered telling Paul that my unnatural obsession with fruit was only a charade to mask the fact that Annie and me had embarked on a thrilling but ultimately doomed affair. She left town to forget me, I said, and I couldn't look at a bowl of rotting bananas without thinking about her.

"I just wanted to hear her sing. She's good isn't she?"

"She's brilliant."

"We could do a lot with her songs."

"We've got a singer. Got Megan."

The edge in his voice frankly shocked me."I wasn't thinking of asking her to join," I explained."I was just saying, you know."

"We're settled," he said tightly."Don't screw things up now."

That told me.

"Hold on!" I called as he marched away. I caught his arm and pulled him around."I'm not doing anything out of order. I'm just keeping our options open."

"Your options," he muttered.

I shook my head emphatically."It's not my band, Paul. Ray has more say in things than I do. I wouldn't do anything without consulting everyone first."

He looked away from me, across the bright lights of the city to the tiny cluster of jewels on the hill that was our town.

"Even Megan?" he said.

************

In a way I had told Paul the truth when I said that I was simply keeping my options open. I didn't consciously plan to throw Megan out of the band, but over the last few months the feeling that she might leave anyway had grown stronger. She and Larry seemed to be on course for a protracted and volatile break-up. The cause of the problem was rarely evident to the rest of the band. They would simply arrive fighting, glare at each other throughout the whole of the gig or rehearsal, and continue the argument on the way home. This went on all through the summer and only added to my fears that Flamboyant Gesture was just too small for both of them.

But despite a few small problems in the personnel department the band did make some musical progress. By the end of the year we were playing our first gigs out of town. Without exception these came at the invitation of other bands we had befriended on our limited circuit, and so we were always the support act. But then a curious pattern began to emerge: None of the bands we supported ever asked us to come back and do it again. The idea of a support band appealed to their egos, but we weren't supposed to steal their thunder. We weren't supposed to steal their gigs either but quite a few landlords of pubs we played in Leeds, Manchester, Sheffield and Wakefield, called Ray at home to ask if Flamboyant Gesture were free to headline.

We were slowly but surely building up a small and loyal following of fans. So there were only ten or twelve of them, fifteen on a good night, and that's no basis for a fan club in anyone's book, but tell us that. We knew all of them by name. They brought food to the gigs because we were struggling with finances. We promised to remember them when we were rich and famous.

In December we were approached by a management company and offered representation. They set us up with our first paying concert, supporting a new recording band at Leeds University. It was a big time show. The music press were due to attend - not just the guy from the Bandscene section of the local paper either, I mean real rock journos from the likes of the NME and Melody Maker. We locked ourselves away at Ray's dad's place and worked harder than we ought to have done. A lot of sweat, a few tears, and four new songs. We were quietly but sincerely determined to blow the main act off stage. And then, two hours before the show, we were dropped. Just like that. No explanation.

Explanation: Larry was fucking our new manager's wife. It was Ray who found out, having gone to the management company's portacabin with his brother and three other bruisers to ask a few searching questions. Ray and I had a private meeting to discuss what to do. I was in favour of asking Larry to leave and had gone so far as to draw up a list of reserve keyboard players, but Ray had his own solution.

"I'll chin him," he said."If he still wants to stay after that, we'll wipe the slate clean."

Two days later Larry showed up at rehearsal with a black eye and a lip like a frankfurter. He told the others that three men had jumped him as he left the pub. Ray added credibility to the story by suggesting we go and look for them.

I don't know if Megan ever found out the truth. I don't think she would have cared in any case. Rumour had it she was progressively sneaking her things out of the house. The rumour came from Paul, who had seen some of Megan's stuff stored at Elliot's place. Stuff like knickers and bras and pregnancy kits.

My own love life contained none of the turmoil and intrigue of the band's first internal affair, but for once I did have a love life. I went on that second date with Alison Stead, and then a third, and a forth, and for the fifth I just said 'I'll see you tomorrow,' and we stayed in and watched a video. All of a sudden we were going steady. We were having sex and arguing about Coronation Street clashing with the live football ( though not at the same time of course), just like a proper couple. It was amazing and frightening in its suddeness and ease. I had led myself to believe that a steady girlfriend was some kind of award which I would only achieve after attaining a certain level of maturity points. I was looking forward to a ceremonial presentation which my mum and dad could attend.

I loved everything about Alison Stead. We could talk about everything and nothing for hours on end with never a dull pause or an awkward silence. She had an opinion on everything, from the merits of concept art to who would win a fight between Bungle and Zippy ( Bungle, we both agreed, because Zippy, having only one arm, could never come up with a good enough combination to knock the bear on its arse). I loved the way she always remembered everyone's birthday, and the way she listened to my daft dreams as though she truly believed in me, and I loved the way she would leave the room and break wind in secret, retaining the mystery and giving me something to giggle about at the same time.

It was a good year, all in all. Even Larry's fall from grace was short lived. On New Year's Eve we gathered for a party at Ray's newly purchased and exceptionally well decorated house and joined together in a rousing version of the David Bowie anthem, Heroes.

A few weeks later the IRA dropped a bomb on us.

I don't know why they chose our town; we are but a dim and unreliable recollection in the nation's conscious, a name of no importance until the non-league football results count on the pools coupon. In the same month the IRA also bombed three other provincial towns, killing five people in total, and I don't know why those towns were chosen either. I've got this image of four hooded figures huddled over a map of Northern England. They each stick a pin in the map, and a drop of blood oozes down the paper. It's a bit melodramatic, I know, but tell us that.

We're of no strategic importance to anyone, except for ASDA perhaps, which owns a sprawling office complex just outside the town centre. So why us, eh? Why me?

Do I blame the IRA for my failure? Yes and no. It's a good place to start anyway. At the time it seemed as though nothing could stop me, not the IRA or any of the tragedies that followed. But gradually it began to dawn on me that we lost something important that day, something we never fully recovered.

Call it my sense of fun if you like, or the moment when a natural ambition exploded into consuming obsession.

THREE

"Nobody goes busking in February," Ray grumbled as he pushed the van through the town centre traffic.

"What's the month got to do it with it?" I asked. I was riding in the front; we had long since given up treating Megan with any kind of reserved respect. She took her turn up front just like everyone did, but when it wasn't her turn she had to take her chances with the ladders and paint tins. At the moment it was calm in the back. Paul was reading an American super hero comic, quietly tutting whenever Ray hit a bump or took a corner too fast. Elliot was smoking a joint, while Larry and Megan were sitting across from each other, subdued like scolded children after Ray had yelled at them for arguing again.

"People don't give as much money away in winter," Ray said."It's a fact."

"Bullshit."

"I got a book on popular psychology out of the library."

"Now that is bullshit."

He gave me a withered glance."And according to this book, the average punter spends three times as much on things like tips for taxi drivers in the spring and summer months as they do in winter."

"Why?"

"Why?" He looked at me blankly and shrugged."How the fuck should I know, Jimmy? Do I look like Sigmund Freud or what?"

I gave up and sighed. Ray was grinning to himself, pleased with his pointless little victory. The thing was, he probably did know why people were more likely to give generously in summer than in winter. Furthermore, the book on popular psychology was probably some hideously academic study beyond the understanding of most readers. Most readers meaning myself, whose idea of popular psychology was limited to books about famous serial killers. But I had recently discovered something about Ray that I was still coming to terms with.

Nosing around his house during the party on New Year's eve, Alison and I had come across a small box room filled with books. After leafing through a few I naturally assumed they were Kat's. Certainly not Ray's. Ray would read books about the Kray twins and voyeuristic accounts of football hooliganism. He would be as lost as I was with the stuff we found. There were only a few novels that I could see, mostly classics or contemporary novels written by American and European writers I'd never even heard of. Not a Stephen King or Jilly Cooper in sight. The rest of Ray's secret library was made up of encyclopedias, history books and thick, highbrow volumes on criminology and sociology. I didn't believe they were Ray's books until Alison asked Kat to confirm it, which she did.

I felt Ray nudge my arm. When I looked I saw that he was getting ready to tell me something. He checked the road, sneaked a quick glance in the back, then leaned over a bit and whispered,"You know she's..." He then traced the outline of an imaginary football under his jacket.

"Megan?" I mouthed, and Ray nodded archly.

"Kat thinks so. Ask Alison." Another sneaky look in the back."I bet it's not lover boy's. If you ask me, it'll come out smoking a joint and asking who turned the fucking sound off."

I sat back in my seat, stunned not by the news but by the implications it would have on the band. Megan being pregnant was one thing, but being pregnant with Elliot's baby was something else. Megan would leave to have the baby, Larry would leave because he wouldn't play in the same band as Elliot, and Elliot himself would probably leave just to fucking spite me. It was possible that within the next nine months Flamboyant Gesture could be down to a trio. I hoped it was Larry's baby, then we would only need to find a new singer.

Ray swerved abruptly into the car park, which was full. He solved the problem by driving slowly up to the front bumper of a Metro and nudging it a good eight feet or so until it was straddling the clear lane between the blocks of parked cars.

"You'll get into trouble for that," I warned him.

He curled his lip and shrugged."Don't mess with the big boys, Jimmy, that's what I always say."

We unloaded and lugged all our equipment - guitars, a couple of battery operated practice amps, three drums and a symbol, portable PA, chairs, hat for the cash - to the prime spot between Marks and Spencer and Just Jeans, only to find a pair of scummy new age traveller types performing a tedious bongo duet.

"I'll have a word with them," Ray said gleefully, and a few seconds later the space was ours.

It was still fairly early and our first three numbers earned us nothing but a few copper and low denomination silver coins thrown almost automatically by half a dozen inattentive people as they hurried past. We stopped for a break after Love The One Your With brought in just five pence.

"I'll get us some coffee in," Larry said. He looked hard at Megan."You coming?"

"Not lately," she muttered under her breath. I think we all heard her.

"I'll go," Paul said. He knelt down and picked the coins out of the hat."I don't think we've got enough. Not for coffee anyway."

Ray sighed and pulled a scrunched up fiver out of his pocket."I want some change out of that."

Paul and Larry went off to get refreshments. I wondered what they would talk about. I could imagine Larry taking the opportunity to unload his troubles on Paul, who would absorb it all with outward stoicism and inward confusion. Paul could never in a million years imagine how living with Megan ( or any woman come to that) could sometimes be a drag. Larry could just as well go into technical details about his car for all Paul would understand. So I might not know what it felt like to be on the verge of breaking up with someone you once loved a lot, but there had been the odd occasion when answering the front door to Alison was like looking out and seeing someone you met years before on holiday and absently invited to drop over if they were ever in the district. And even that was a million miles away from what Larry and Megan were going through.

As all of this was going through my mind I was aware of a tall, charismatic figure in a black felt hat and long woollen coat looking at us as he passed. He paused and slipped his hands in his pockets.

"You're not playing then?" he asked Ray, who, ever the diplomat, told him to go and play with his dick. The man shrugged and walked off.

"You moron," Elliot remarked as he wiped his drumsticks with a soft cloth."Don't you know who that was?"

"Go on," Ray grunted."Surprise me."

"It was only Mark Knopfler."

"Mark bollocks."

Elliot nodded soberly."I tell you it was."

"Jesus," I breathed."You moron."

"Mark bollocks," Ray repeated, staring thoughtfully up the precinct at the dwindling figure in black."MARK!"

The man kept on walking.

**************

By lunch time we had attracted quite a crowd. Not enough to cause a human jam in the precinct, but certainly the kind of numbers you normally only see gathered around juggling clowns and serious accidents. Part of me knows that most of those people stopped only because others had stopped. Ray would be able to explain that better, if he was in the mood to that is, but it has something to do with crowd mentality. A lone busker attracts no attention whatsoever ( unless it happens to be Bob Dylan or Elvis or someone just as unlikely ), a duet or trio maybe a few curious glances, but a group of buskers - especially an electric group - will always cause a bit of a stir, if only because a crowd feeds on itself. And there's another part of me still believes that we drew such a large crowd that day because we were a frigging good rock and roll band.

I saw Alison arrive with Kat, who was wheeling baby Ray in a pushchair. The baby's face was covered in jam from the doughnut he was using as a teething ring. Alison held up my furry earmuffs, a Christmas present from her I had been trying to lose ever since opening the package.

I waved Alison over and kissed her cold, dry lips as she crowned me with the earmuffs.

"Grab a tambourine," I said."You've just joined the band. The hours are shit, there's no money in it, but at least you get to shag the guitar player."

I also invited Kat to join us for a song or two but she just smiled shyly and shook her head.

"Ticket To Ride," Ray announced, for our benefit."Elliot...ELLIOT!" He spun round and clamped his hands to his ears."Turn it on, Elliot, for crying out loud!"

Elliot gazed back at him with that placid Labrador expression."I can't turn it on when I'm playing, Ray. Doesn't sound right."

Ray glanced my way, shaking his head a little."Fucking deaf drummer, Jimmy, I still can't get over it. Ticket To Ride, Elliot. Got it?"

"No need to shout, man," Elliot said softly.

"He kills me," Ray laughed.

"One-two-three-four..."

**************

I still don't know what made Megan turn around when she did. I remember she was grinning and holding the microphone behind her back, so maybe she was about to say something. We'd got past the stage where we had to look at what our fingers were doing all the time. Ray and I often talked on stage - when he wasn't singing that is. We never got into deep discussions or anything - we weren't the Rolling Stones - but we did rib each other a lot and maybe take the piss out of someone in the audience.

I think Megan was going to scream. That's a terrible irony to live with. She had grown into this habit of clasping the microphone behind her back and letting loose a kind of delirious cowboy yell. She said it was pure joy and excitement, and she had no control over it. Like an orgasm or something. Anyway, I think she was about to do just that, when all of a sudden the precinct exploded and she really was screaming.

I felt something hit my back with a force that knocked me forward onto my knees. I heard the blast of course - must have done - but the old sound and pictures routine got a bit shaken up in the confusion. At the time I was aware of very little other than a force from nowhere suddenly coming up against my puny form.

This is difficult to explain, but if you can imagine every single letter you've ever received in your whole life falling through the letter box at precisely the same time, and then having to arrange your life in chronological order from your very first pay check right through to your last mortgage payment, you'll get some idea of what those first few minutes after the explosion is like in my head. It's still like that. I mean, I've got all the time in the world to slow the film down and watch it frame by frame, but some bits are lost forever. So I'm sorry if my version of events doesn't quite have the informative continuity of the news reports you may have seen or read since, but Ray's baby died and my band blew up and Megan is scarred for life, and maybe I'm still upset, but I don't think the details matter that much.

So I was on my knees, my hands flat on the pavement, my guitar still strapped loosely to my chest, and Megan was screaming. There was blood running down my face and my back felt like it was on fire. I started crawling, slumped to my elbows, then dragged the guitar strap over my head. Absently I felt for my earmuffs but they were no longer where they should have been. Blown off, I thought with a kind of distant hysterical humour. My fucking earmuffs blew off my head.

I heard somebody moaning. I could hear a lot of people moaning in fact, moaning and screaming, but this was different. It was the sound of something wrecked and tortured and hopeless. When I looked up I saw that it was Kat.

Around me the others were beginning to struggle to their feet. I remember Paul getting up and staggering around in a drunken circle before falling through the huge gap where the window of Just Jeans used to be. He sat down next to a mannequin, cradling his bass guitar against his chest.

Ray lurched past me, knocking me back to the ground, and made his way over to Kat. Next to her the baby's pushchair was on its side in what I can only describe as a puddle of blood. Ray knelt down and tilted the chair back on its wheels. Calmly he unbuckled the straps and lifted the baby out. He stood beside Kat, both of them staring up at the cold white sky.

As I watched this a familiar figure wearing a fez marched determinedly across my line of vision. It was Larry, his head high, his stride long and purposeful. I had no idea where he was going.

It seems it was the sirens that started the panic - unless I'm confusing minutes with seconds, in which case the panic was almost immediate. Suddenly people were running everywhere, frightened, reckless, stumbling and falling over their own feet. Others were darting back and forth, desperately searching for someone lost in the confusion.

I went over to Megan and shook her gently by the shoulders.

"Megan. It's me...it's Jimmy, Megan."

I started saying silly things like she shouldn't worry and everything would be alright. She didn't respond to me. She was sobbing now, and shaking so badly it was frightening the life out of me. I tried to pull her hands from her face but they were welded there.

"Megan, just let me-"

I tried again, and this time she shrieked.

"Megan..."

It was Elliot. He knelt down beside her, and she fell against his chest. That's when I left them, because I suddenly remembered that Alison had been standing next to me when the blast occurred.

Now I was caught in the panic. Forgetting the pain in my back and legs, I leapt to my feet and began to search for her among the human debris and other stricken hunters, calling her name and hearing nothing but strange names called back at me. Then I thought I saw her, but it couldn't have been her. It could only have been the girl from that horror movie, Carrie, the one who has a bucket of blood dumped on her head.

"Alison...Oh, shit, oh, Alison, Jesus Christ..."

She was sitting some twenty yards from where we had been playing, her legs crossed, her eyes glazed and unseeing. When I called her name she looked up at me with a scrunched up little frown.

"I want to go home," she said in a voice as dry and bland as a cream cracker."I want to go home now."

***************

The next time I saw Ray and Kat was on the front page of the following day's Sun. Moments before the blast, some guy ( and call me naive, or sexist, or whatever you want, but somehow I doubt Josephine Public's selfish killer instinct in these circumstances) had bought himself a camera outfit, complete with various lenses and rolls of film, from a shop in the precinct. Within seconds of the blast he had loaded up his new toy and was clicking away for all he was worth - which, as it turned out, was about seven and a half grand, if the figures are to be believed. I don't really blame him though. I suppose someone should record these things when they happen.

Alison and I went to hospital in the same ambulance. Ray and Kat were among the first to be taken away, while the rest of us, the walking wounded, the maimed, the shocked and the hysterical, were assessed by paramedics and put onto some sort of priority list.

Sitting there on the cold, hard pavement, my arm around Alison's stiff shoulders, I watched Megan being loaded into the back of an ambulance on one of those stretcher chairs. There was a clumsy-looking white pad over most of one side of her face. A female police constable held her hand and spoke some secret words of comfort in her ear, while plodding behind, shoulders slumped, his head bowed and his hair hanging over his eyes, was Elliot. I always envied him that private world of his where he often retreated in times of stress or moods of simple self-appreciation, and never more so than now. It was probably a little bizarre in there from all the grass he smoked, and much too quiet for my liking, but it had to be better than this ruined battle field.

I saw Paul at the hospital. I was lying face down on a trolley, in the process of having my left buttock stitched by smirking nurse, when I spied him through a crack in the curtain. He was being led into the adjacent cubicle by a male nurse who carried Paul's bass like a roadie. I thought it inappropriate to wave.

All in all I received seven stitches; two in my left buttock, three in my leg, and one each in my shoulder and neck. The rest of my wounds were superficial. I've never told anyone that except for Alison. I just say that I was injured in the blast and leave it at that.

Alison's injuries were more serious. A small but significant sliver of glass had wedged itself into her head and had to be surgically removed. Alison's mother told me the news. She came to see me in the corridor where I had been left, face down, buttocks thankfully covered, until arrangements could be made to get me home. I was feeling ridiculous and agitated and generally demanding of attention, but when Alison's mother appeared, ashen, red-eyed, and told me that Alison was on her way to theatre, I became fretful and almost broke down. I was determined not to cry, not face down in a busy corridor with a light covering of gauze over my bare buttocks, but then my mum and dad came round the corner, looking strangely old and bewildered, and my eyes grew hot and prickly and I just couldn't hold back any more. My mum held my hand and stroked the back of my head and told me there was a hot bath and clean sheets waiting for me at home, and that dad had remembered to set the video for Match Of The Day. I felt seven years old and safe from all the monsters.

**************

"Bit of a mess," I said, and Paul looked at his bandaged hand and nodded soberly. We were waiting for the taxis to take us home. Paul's mum was talking in hushed tones with my mum and dad. They still called us 'the boys'.

"Where's your guitar?"

"In town," I said."I asked one of the coppers to look out for it. That's if it doesn't get looted."

Outside we could see a small crowd of press photographers and television news people standing in a fairly ordered huddle behind a police cordon.

"This is so bizarre."

"It's national news," Paul said, his voice conveying a sense of pride and importance. I didn't know if he was being ironic or not.

"We drew a bigger crowd than that today."

Paul looked at me and smiled dimly."We were alright, yeah?"

"We were great." I put my arm around his shoulder for a second or two. We could do stuff like that, but only for a second or two."We'll bounce back from this. We'll be stronger for it. And it could have been worse, you know...I might have died, then where would you be?"

Quick smile. I could tell that he wasn't in the mood to be cheered up. I knew what was on his mind.

"She'll be alright. A couple of stitches, I bet. It always looks worse than it really is. And she'll still be able to sing, won't she?"

"I was thinking about Ray and Kat," he said hollowly."I don't like what's happening to you, Jimmy."

***************

Paul's remark kept me awake that night. I was trying to figure out what he could have meant, but it was years before the answer came to me. Or perhaps I should say it was years before I properly understood, because the answer was in my head even as I lay there on my stomach, frightened of catching my stitches on the fleece under-blanket. You see, if Alison was on my mind, and Elliot was on my mind, and Ray and Kat's loss was on my mind, or if I was worried enough to call Larry on the phone and ask how he was, I wouldn't have had the time to brood over what Paul had said to me. But I did. I know I'm a shit, but I cared more about the greater good of the band than I did for its individual members. I loved the band. If you were in it I loved you too, but I'm afraid it was a package deal, non-negotiable. It was in me when I left whatsisname playing on the fruit machine instead of waiting for him to finish, and it stayed with me until I sat on a park bench ten years later and wept for all of us.

***************

Alison was allowed out of hospital after two days. I took bags of fruit and sweets to her house and we watched television in her bedroom. She showed me the little bald patch the surgeon had shaved in order to remove the glass from her head, and naturally I felt obliged to show her my buttock. She laughed so much her mother came in and warned me that if I was going to be disruptive and not allow Alison to rest then I would be out on my ear.

"Better than being slung out on your arse," Alison sniggered when her mother had closed the door.""Your stitches would burst."

I was laughing at this when Alison suddenly made a gurgle of surprise and began scrambling among the crisp packets and Opal Fruit wrappers on the bed until she located the remote control unit for the television. I looked to the screen just as the sound came on, and I heard Ray talking about the day his son was killed.

"Jesus, it's Ray!" I yelled, and Alison nudged me to shut up. It shouldn't have come as all that much of a surprise. Ray and Kat had been paraded in front of a gradually dwindling television audience on virtually every news bulletin since the explosion. The first statement they made, on police advise, was at the main press conference given only a couple of hours following the blast. They sat between two huge, reassuringly mature police detectives, looking painfully young and misplaced. Fighting to keep his composure, Ray made an appeal for information and witnesses, while Kat, most probably sedated, just stared at the desk and didn't speak at all. After that came interviews with Newsnight and the breakfast television people, plus a short follow-up piece which made the six o'clock news but not the main evening news. Something else happened, I expect, some royal tittle-tattle or a new political scandal. I doubt the human interest angle would have lasted as long as it did had one of the dead not been a baby. Now they were on a daytime talk show alongside a celebrity vet and a zany chef, one step up from a brief Radio 4 interview before drifting back into Northern oblivion.

The interview didn't last very long. It was little more than a standard tea and sympathy bit for the housewives to weep over until the handsome vet came along to cheer them up with a heartwarming tale about fluffy kittens.

"Are they in London then?" Alison asked. She switched off the television as the picture cut to a wildlife sanctuary and some rescued swans having a bath.

"I don't know." I was still a little surprised ( and disappointed) that Ray had failed to mention the name of the band in yet another national television interview. Okay, so I didn't expect him to give out his phone number and declare we were free for bookings, but it can't have been too much trouble to say Flamboyant Gesture instead of 'I was busking with some friends.'

"Haven't you spoken to him?"

"No. Have you spoken to Kat?"

"No."

We looked at each other, and because neither of us knew what to say, we ended up giggling. We weren't rolling around on the bed with our legs in the air, I should point out, but it was one of those dirty picture moments that only a guilty snigger can get you through. We didn't want to talk about dead babies, partly because we might end up talking about living babies, and owning a house just like Ray and Kat and Larry and Megan. We were content for the moment, thankyou, happy fighting over the last strawberry Opal Fruit and watching television in a bedroom only feet above a suspicious and disapproving parent.

****************

I went to see Larry a couple of days later. I hoped that Megan would be home, bandaged and upset but bravely determined to soldier on for the sake the band. In fact it looked as though nobody was home because Larry's car was missing from the drive. I rang the bell anyway, hoping now to catch Megan alone, but it was Larry who answered. He grinned sheepishly and let me in.

"Is Megan home yet?"

He made a face and shook his head."She won't be home for a while, Jimmy."

"But how is she?"

"Scarred for life and deeply traumatised," he said."Do you want tea or coffee?"

We drank our coffee in the kitchen, which was still without a floor covering. The house had never been decorated with any kind of care or expectation. Only the bathroom, which Ray had painted and tiled, looked completely finished.

"They got this plastic surgeon up from Leeds to sew her face back together," Larry told me."I haven't seen under the bandages yet, but she's been warned not to expect too much. It was a kind of damage limitation exercise, I suppose. We won't really know how bad it is for some time yet."

I wanted to know if some time was a matter of weeks or months but I thought it best not to ask...best not to ask Larry in any case. Instead I asked him how he was - and more specifically what happened to him that day, but he couldn't really tell me.

"I had to get away," he said. He looked at me and shook his head."I mean, it was so important that I get away."

"So where did you go?"

He laughed and opened his arms."I don't know. I came back here but I don't remember anything until the next morning. I must have gone straight to bed and slept right through."

"But you're alright now?"

"Sure. I feel alright."

"Have you seen a doctor?"

He nodded."I went to the hospital the next day - to see Megan - and ended up telling one of the doctors there what had happened. They just had a look at me and said I should rest."

"Have you spoken to one of the trauma people?"

"Have you?"

The question was sharp and as accusing as it was defensive."No."

"Neither have I," he said."I'll talk to my mates if I feel the need to get something off my chest. I don't need a social worker pretending to be a shrink."

I let the matter drop. I figured he was right in a way. All that therapy nonsense was for Americans and people with no friends.

"You haven't been to work then?"

"Nah," he said with a crafty smile that was more like himself."I can spin this out for weeks if I like. Some other mug can print my sauce bottle labels for now. Besides..." He stared vaguely around the kitchen."I'm waiting in for the electrician."

He walked me to the garden gate, shivering in just a shirt and jeans, a bowler hat and nothing on his feet.

"How's Paul?"

"He's doing alright. I'm going over there now."

"What about Elliot?"

"I haven't seen him. I'll go tomorrow."

He nodded stiffly."Ray must be feeling pretty low."

I agreed solemnly."Where's your car?" I asked, mostly to get off the subject.

"I had to scrap it," Larry said."The electrics were funny."

"Not having a lot of luck with electrics, are you?"

He smiled dimly."A lot of luck, Jimmy, but all of it bad. What happened to the instruments, by the way? Are they gone?"

"The coppers picked them up. We can get them back any time... Well, when we're ready I mean."

************

A month later I called a crisis meeting in the Duke, only I didn't refer to it in such dramatic terms. I simply rang the others and said it might be a good idea if we get together and talk. Only Megan was absent. Kat and Alison had been to see her (she was out of hospital and staying with her parents for a while) and apparently she was baring up well, considering the circumstances. Alison told me that the scar on Megan's face ran from below her left eye and down to her top lip in a wobbly line, and then curved back towards her ear lobe. She shuddered as she told me this, even though she insisted that it wasn't as bad as it sounded.

"Will it fade?" I asked her.

"Dunno," Alison said."It's one of those only time will tell things. They might be able to repair it some more with skin grafts, and she could wear more make-up I suppose..."

"But you'll still be able to notice it?"

She nodded silently and left the room. I knew she was crying but decided not to follow her. If she had wanted me to see her cry she wouldn't have left the room in the first place, I figured. A few minutes later she returned, her face puffy and red, and she asked me if I would have left her had she been scarred for life.

"Of course I wouldn't," I said."What about you? Can you still love a man with a disfigured buttock?"

She burst into snotty laughter and hugged me. I don't know what else she expected me to say.

Alison didn't come to the Duke for the meeting, and neither did Kat. It was a band thing, though I don't recall specifying this in any of the phone calls I made. It was something we just accepted.

Ray got the drinks in, as usual, and joined us at the table. He looked okay, but then all of his injuries were internal.

We did a round of asking each other how we were, answered in quick smiles and embarrassed shrugs. It was like swapping Christmas cards in a way - the sentiment was there but we were uncomfortable and clumsy expressing it and even worse when it came to accepting.

"I think everyone should decide what's best for him," I said, after I'd opened the meeting by asking the Big Question: Are we still a band? "I want to carry on, but somebody else might want to leave. That's fine, that's his decision, but we shouldn't just fold."

"I'm staying," Paul said. He spoke very quietly, almost as if he was ashamed of his decision, and he made sure that he wasn't looking anyone in the eye.

"Larry?"

"I'm still here," Larry said."Nothing better to do in the evenings."

"What about you, Elliot?"

Elliot was gazing into his pint glass, seemingly out of the conversation.

"Elliot?"

He lifted his head and smiled serenely."I didn't catch that."

"I said are you staying?"

"For an hour or two, yeah."

Ray choked on a mouthful of beer, and then we were all laughing together. I felt the warmth of optimism glow inside me like a shot of rum.

"I meant are you staying with the band?"

"Of course," Elliot said.

I then turned to Ray, who was watching Elliot with a distant smile."What about you?"

"It's not me I'm thinking about, Jimmy. It's what Kat will make of it." He looked at me and shrugged apologetically."It's just a bit soon for me to be thinking about the band. Maybe if we took a few months off."

"Is that what you want?"

He nodded."You can carry on without me if you want - for a few months I mean."

Paul passed me a look that I couldn't really ignore, although if Ray had suggested taking a year off instead of a few of months I think I might have done.

"Let's vote on it," I said."All those in favour of taking three months off, raise a hand."

That was that. Flamboyant Gesture was officially laid off.

***************

Megan moved back in with Larry in April. She wasn't pregnant, and I think that had a lot to do with the two of them deciding to work things out rather than split up. I suspect that Larry knew she had been seeing someone else, though whether he knew it was Elliot was another matter. They seemed happy enough in any case. Alison and I visited them once, taking a bottle of wine and the phone number of the fastest pizza delivery people. We called it a dinner party. It was a pleasant enough evening but I couldn't help feeling on edge over the whole scar situation. I should have been sufficiently mature by now to confront this thing head on, but instead I took the easy way out and simply avoided eye-contact with her. I spent the whole evening with a prop of some kind - beer bottle, wine bottle, slice of pizza, album cover - so that I always had something to concentrate on while I was talking.

We argued about it on the way home. I would have got away with it had the conversation at Larry's place not turned to summer holidays. Larry and Megan were thinking about going to Greece ( somewhere quiet, Larry added sensitively, somewhere on the mainland away from the rowdy bunch on the islands ), and Ray and Kat had been offered two weeks in Florida by a mystery businessman, no strings, no sponsorship deals. We, on the other hand, weren't going anywhere. I had a band to rebuild and a reputation to save, but this time Alison didn't understand.

So on the way home we argued about holidays again, and because I wouldn't give in nor even compromise by saying I would think about it, the argument broadened to take in my general attitude to...well, to everything, from holidays and looking at little flats ( just look, Jimmy, for crying out loud!), to my general impatience and insensitivity regarding Megan and Ray.

They were arguments neither of us could win. And here I'm not saying that neither of us was right, because I know full well who was right. Two weeks in the sun would not have set the band any further back, and of course it wouldn't have hurt just to look at a couple of little flats, but I only know that now; when I had an ambition it was an ambition at any cost.

Sulky and miserable, we said a terse goodnight and didn't properly make up again until after I'd screwed Sandy.

Sandy was my piano teacher. My decision to learn the piano came out of a conversation I had with Paul in Elliot's drum room. I was trying to convince him that we could continue without Megan should it come to that. We would simply have to shove all the vocals onto Ray. It then struck me that if Larry left the band we would need to embark on a search for a new keyboard player, and in the meantime re-arrange our set to compensate for the absence of swirly synthesizer fills and that dramatic choral background we often used. Whereas if I learned to play the keyboards we would only need to cover for my guitar parts - much easier and less noticeable - until a replacement was found. Luckily I considered Elliot and Paul to be the archetypal rock-solid rhythm foundation, as unlikely to leave Flamboyant Gesture as I was, and therefore I saw no immediate need to learn the drums and bass.

I was attracted to Sandy for all the wrong reasons. She was older than me for a start - closer to forty than I was to thirty - but the age gap was only part of the challenge. My first impression of her was of someone whose repressed upbringing in the hands of stern, God-fearing parents would eventually lead to a dignified descent into terminal madness or an incident in Safeway involving a bible and a carving knife.

She lived alone in a huge Victorian house in the student area of Leeds. On the front door was a little brass plaque in fancy script which read Miss S. Olivier, Piano Teacher. And that was Sandy: a woman intelligent and determined enough to have gained qualifications from the Royal College of Music but too burdened with humility and self-doubt to say so on her plaque.

I learned virtually nothing about her private life in those first few weeks other than what my over-active imagination could surmise from her dress sense and general demeanour. For instance, I knew she wore floral dresses and flat brown shoes, so I naturally assumed that she would also wear sensible white knickers with strong elasticated legs - only she would call them underpants because knickers was a swear word. And she wore stockings. Not tights, you understand, but real stockings. I knew this because I could sometimes feel her suspender belt against my thigh when we were sitting at the piano. I'd never been with a woman who wore authentic stockings and suspenders. Alison sometimes paraded around her room in some lacy substitute from the Anne Summers catalogue, but nice as that was it couldn't compare with the genuine article. I suppose that Sandy ignited some smouldering fetish inside me, because my fantasies at the time were dominated by sexually repressed librarian-types in fifties underwear.

There never was a time when we sat down together and openly discussed her secret life - In fact even the most mundane of conversation was difficult to extract from Sandy - but by asking the right questions and reading between the lines I was eventually able to see beyond that stifled exterior, all the way into her underpants if not her soul.

Piecing together Sandy's story was like reading snippets from my great grandmother's diary. The incredible part came in remembering that it was all so recent. When Sandy told me that her father had a study I naturally thought of the box room where my dad would type letters to the tax man and listen to the football match on a portable radio, but she then went on to describe a formal office with its own telephone line and a desk the size of a snooker table. Sandy would be summoned there like a member of staff, to knock on the door and await his call to enter. Lectures and punishments and even scant praise was handed down there, always in an atmosphere of solemn ritual, like a medal ceremony or a court sentence.

She began to open up about her father one stormy afternoon in May. The lesson had just finished when the sky turned a biblical black and deep, rolling voices of thunder made the old house shake. Sandy said she would make tea while I waited for the storm to subside. I waited in the drawing room under the disapproving eye of her parents in their antique silver frames, touched by a vague feeling of melodrama.

Tea was served from a little silver pot containing just enough liquid to fill two delicate china cups. Even the dainty biscuits came on a silver platter. When we served tea at our house we always asked if you wanted a cup or a mug.

Prompted by a few tactful questions, Sandy began to speak of her father's study and some of the things that went on in there, and because I heard the announcement for Strangeville and didn't fancy getting off at this stop, I made a sudden move on her. I thought she would push me away or lightly slap my face like one of those women from the Sunday afternoon matinees, but instead she jumped on me and began tearing at my shirt. We did it right there on the Parker Knoll, five minutes of furious excitement followed by great sinking feelings of disappointment and betrayal.

There were no more piano lessons. I used the last of my savings to buy a second hand synthesiser, and when Alison found out she hit me in the face with a rice paddle. My lip split and bled all night, but I was just grateful for having the sense not to have told her about Sandy.

Things had been going well between us until then. Our relationship took a nosedive after the big argument we had on the way home from Larry and Megan's dinner party, and it didn't begin to climb back to its cruising altitude until after the Sandy incident. Until the day after, to be exact, because that was the day I met Alison from work with a big bunch of flowers and the promise of a summer holiday. I wasn't serious about the holiday. I thought another bunch of flowers nearer the time would cover me there. That was stupid of me, I later realised, but I'd been brought up to believe that women were as gullible as children when it came to bribery.

As things turned out I never even got to break my promise, because as soon as she found out about the synthesiser she arranged to go on holiday with two friends from work. If that was what she wanted, I told her, then it was fine by me, so long as she understood that we were finished. She couldn't go off to Spain with two other slappers and expect me to sit at home waiting for my stuffed donkey and duty-free fags.

As the date of her departure neared my indignity melted into anxiety, and finally into fear. I went over to her house the night before she was due to leave, and I practically begged her not to go. I didn't want to lose her, especially not to five plasterers from Birkenhead and a greasy waiter on an uninsured moped. She cried and told me not to be stupid, and we kissed and promised to be faithful but then I went and ruined it all by saying that I couldn't meet her at the airport because we had a gig that night.

Alison left for spain towards the end of August, and I plunged into a wretched depression, which Ray found hilarious. Two weeks later there was a tearful reunion in her bedroom. I bought more flowers and promised to look at some little flats.

The band was back together by then, although we didn't play live until October, over eight months after the blast and our last live performance. Our first show was at the Duke because we needed the safety and reassurance of home ground to kick us off into what I had termed Phase 2. We performed all our own songs except for California Dreaming and an unforgettable encore of Heroes. It was meant to be a low-key affair in front of a handful of regulars and the remnants of our unofficial fanclub, but the landlord of the Duke put up posters proclaiming us to be the band the IRA couldn't stop, and the old place was packed to the rafters. It was a good show, one of the best. I was proud of us all.

In November of this year I went to Leeds to see Annie Lawrence play a concert in an exciting new venue I'd read about in the local paper. I thought she must have hit the big time, or a place heading up that way, but the venue turned out to be a dingy back room in an artificial traditional pub in the centre of town. There wasn't even a stage, just a raised platform obscured by beer barrels with table tops.

She was pleased to see me, and for the first time in my life I could be pleased to see her without worrying about my breath or my hair or what that coy smile of hers was really trying to say.

"So will you come? It's just a rehearsal, no pressure. You don't even have to play if you don't feel like it."

"I don't know," she said."It might not suit me, being in a band."

"You'll like them, I swear."

Her smile told me she was weakening."What are they like?"

I had to be careful not to put her off at this point. I could have told her that we had a deaf drummer and a keyboard player who shagged anything that wasn't tethered to a pole, a stick of fizzing dynamite for a singer and a bass player who was a cross between Woody Allen and Clarke Kent.

"They're just ordinary guys," I said.

Annie came along to one of our rehearsal sessions and met the others. Larry was charming, Ray was polite but indifferent, and Elliot, stoned to the brink, just grinned and waved from behind his drum kit. The only stumbling block was Paul, who was openly hostile towards her. It wasn't so much what he said - because he didn't open his mouth to her all night - but in the way he so obviously ignored her. It was as though he was seeing something he knew to be a hallucination, such as the ominous return of a particular dangerous imaginary friend, and was determined to deny its existence by pretending he couldn't see it at all.

"You're being an idiot," I whispered to him when we broke for a beer.

"I'm being an idiot?" he huffed back. Suddenly possessed with Paul-rage, he tugged the ring on his beer can, spraying his glasses with foam."I'm not the one doing this."

"Doing What?"

He glowered at Annie, his eyes mean and spiteful."This," he said.

Upsetting the balance, he meant, bringing in an outsider. Paul was happy with stability and familiarity; he feared even the smallest changes to his routine because emotionally speaking he wasn't qualified to navigate unknown territory. Likewise, every new person who entered his life had to be viewed with caution and suspicion in case they were setting him up for some huge practical joke. It took years before Paul would trust somebody. He trusted Elliot, but I think he was still looking over his shoulder at Larry and Ray, waiting for them to reach into his jeans and yank his underpants up the crack of his arse.

Annie didn't officially join Flamboyant Gesture until the New Year, but she hung out with us a lot and briefly joined us on stage at a Christmas Eve concert in Otley. I was hoping that Paul would warm to her but at Ray and Kat's party on New Year's Eve he brought the situation to a head by churlishly refusing her invitation to a kiss beneath the mistletoe.

"I'll have his if he doesn't want it!" Larry shouted from across the room. Bizarrely, the only person in the house who wasn't wearing a party hat was Larry.

"What's wrong with him?" Annie turned to me as Paul retreated into a corner to sulk. She looked shocked and a bit stung."I can't put a foot right as far as he's concerned."

"It might take some time," I told her, manoeuvring myself under the mistletoe after first checking that Alison was safely out of sight."Paul's like a code, it's just a matter of breaking him. After that he's easy to get along with."

"I don't want to cause any trouble," she said."Ray said it might be because of Megan. Paul thinks that you and I conspired to get Megan out of the band."

"Forget Megan. She isn't even at the party. And we didn't plant that bomb did we? Megan left because her confidence has deserted her. I'm sorry for that. I mean, I really like Megan, but I won't let the grass grow, and if Paul can't understand that, well..." I looked over at Paul, who was leafing through Ray's record collection with a face like a damp cloth."He might have to make a choice himself." I turned back to Annie and smiled reassuringly."Besides, Paul never said those things to Ray."

"Oh? How do you know?"

"Because I know Ray. Ask him if he's familiar with Jeung's theory of the collective conscious and he'll say no, but I might have the live album."

Annie smiled bemusedly."I don't understand."

"He's brighter than he lets on, that's all." I lifted my eyes to the mistletoe hanging above us."Now..."

Just then Larry shoulder-barged me into the Christmas tree.

"Well hello," he crooned in his best Leslie Phillips. And some you lose.

I went to look for Alison but found myself alone with Kat in the spare bedroom - or what was now a spare bedroom. There was a touch of the beautiful widow about her these days; her large dark eyes contained a mysterious longing I found strangely compelling.

"I'm glad we're alone," she said."I wanted to talk to you about Ray."

We sat down on the old settee. She was wearing a black cocktail dress and a white ribbon in her hair, and her skin was creamy and smooth with just the right dash of eye-shadow and lipstick. She sat with her hands folded in her lap, her knees together and her feet in the ten-to-two position, something only children and slim young women can achieve with any kind of naturalness.

Kat told me that Ray was being lured back into his bad old ways by his brother and the motley collection of petty crooks and minor drug dealers that were his friends. There were things in the house they hadn't paid for - a new settee, a piano, state of the art television and stereo equipment - which Ray had explained away with some tale about payment in kind for jobs on the side.

"Who pays the decorator with a brand new leather Chesterfield?" she asked in that quiet, always troubled little voice."They pinched all that stuff from warehouses, I know they did."

She then quizzed me about certain nights we were meant to have rehearsed on, some going all the way back to March. Not only had she memorised the dates, she also knew what the weather had been like and what was on television. I thought about her sitting all alone in the house with nothing left to cling to except the ghost of her dead child and repeats of Cheers on satellite television.

I helped her where I could but at the same time I was careful not to commit myself one way or the other. It tore me up to see her so worried and unhappy but I was loyalty bound not to drop Ray in the shit.

"And there's money, too, money he can't explain." Her head dropped."Won't explain, I mean. He won't talk to me about anything these days."

I made a sympathetic noise and reached for her hand. That's all it was meant to be, a hand of comfort from a friend, but all of a sudden we were kissing. There was no great passionate response from Kat, but then she wasn't the sort. Kat was warm and soft and tender and her kiss was exactly that. One hand reached up and rested lightly on the back of my neck, while the fingers of her other hand gently touched and then moved lightly against my chest. Lips pouted and velvety, eyes closed and peaceful as a sleeping child's. I wondered what it would be like to sleep with her in my arms, and I found myself thinking of a hot water bottle shaped like a woman with the texture of rose petals.

Nothing else happened. It was a perfect kiss with a perfect ending. Romance, sadness, danger and a hint of promise, and it happened without a single word being spoken, like a silent silver screen playing to an empty theatre.

***************

Later that night we all sang together on Heroes and joined hands at the stroke of midnight. It had been a traumatic year and not all of us had made it through in one piece. Now Paul had slumped to a drunken, knotted slumber in one of the leather chairs, Annie and Larry had sneaked off together, Ray was showing Elliot his brand new stack system, and I was kissing Alison but thinking of Kat.

Only one thing was I certain of as we entered our forth year together - that one or more of us would be missing when New Year's Eve came around again.

FOUR

Early in the New Year I put some synthesiser songs I'd written onto tape and gave them to Elliot for his opinion. They weren't songs in the same sense as those I'd written on the guitar - the standard three to five minute quirky rock tunes with no complicated chord changes - they were more like chunks of instrumental music in the classical vein.

"I like them," Elliot said. He was sitting behind his kit in the drum room, puffing on a joint that was almost as long as a drumstick."A bit Pink Floyd though, you know. We won't get on Top Of The Pops with these, Jimmy."

"I wasn't trying to be commercial," I told him. I was sitting on the floor at the far end of the room, my back against the wall and my knees drawn up to my chest. I had a joint of my own but it was considerably shorter and less densely packed with cannabis than the one Elliot was smoking. Even so I was feeling drowsy and pleasantly light-headed."I was trying to paint pictures and write novels in music form. Take that first track - with that piece I was trying to convey everything I've always loved about cricket."

"You don't like cricket."

"I don't like the game itself, no." I drew in on the reefer; my voice came back all high and croaky."But I've always loved the Englishness of it." I tilted my head back and felt my body float upward a little, then briefly hover before returning gently to the floor. I opened my eyes and grinned at Elliot."Did I levitate just then?"

"Spiritually, man," Elliot laughed.

"Anyway, whenever I think of cricket I think of pastel colours and dreamy English summer days, perfect lawns and perfect gentlemen. So that first track is supposed to represent those moods and images."

Elliot was nodding."It's a bit long, that's all."

"It was a test series," I said, and Elliot coughed out a ragged cloud of herby smoke.

We listened to the tapes and slowly deteriorated under the influence.

"I like this one," Elliot said."This has got potential. We can work on this if you want."

"Untitled Part 4," I drawled."It's called The Bend In The River."

"What's it about?"

"About twelve minutes," I said, and appropriately we seemed to giggle over that for about twelve minutes."Is that your phone?"

Elliot scanned the floor, his head rolling drunkenly."Is what my phone?"

"Ringing - is that your phone ringing?"

He looked up and grinned bashfully."Fuck," he said."I'm always doing stuff like that. Are you sitting on my hearing aid?"

"Hey, if I was I could talk out of my arse and hear what I was saying."

"I bet it stops before I get there. Bugger always does that."

He paused the door and frowned quizzically."Which phone was it?"

"Downstairs..." I cocked my head and listened. I wasn't sure that I hadn't imagined it now."I think."

"Did it go ring-ring, dring-dring, or prump-prump?"

I got the giggles again. Elliot just rolled his eyes and went out of the room."EEEK-EEEK!" I yelled after him. I smiled one of those dopey Stan Laurel smiles to myself."It was the bat phone," I muttered.

It was the hall phone, in fact, and buzzing waspishly on the other end of the line was Alison. I had completely forgotten about the two flats we were meant to be viewing.

"We had appointments!" she hissed."I'll look like an idiot now, Jimmy!"

"Browned in a minute," I mumbled."Don't tell your mum."

"I'm still at work, moron! You were supposed to meet me over an hour ago!"

"Right, right, browned in a minute."

There was a short, menacing silence, then, quietly, she said,"You better not be pissed, Jimmy."

"No! Alison, I swear-"

"Or stoned."

"Browned in a minute."

I hung up. Elliot was standing beside me, slumped against the wall with his eyes shut. Incredibly I'd seen him perform in much worse states than this.

"Alright?"

"No, man, no. She'll go banana splits if I don't meet her in about five minutes."

Elliot nodded and pushed himself away from the wall. He swayed a little, his eyelids lifting with painful reluctance."I'll give you a lift," he said.

The flat we looked at turned out to be unsuitable. It was poky and dark and had one of those narrow little kitchens you only expect to find on barges. Over the next few weeks we viewed something like fifteen flats and rejected all of them because they were either too small or too large. Alison almost fell in love with one little place on the snobbish Ingles estate but I managed to convince her that the second bedroom, which she found cute and appealing, was technically a box room, serving no useful purpose other than to provide a place for drunk friends to throw up over other people's coats. It certainly wasn't large enough for a music room.

In early February I found what I thought was the perfect place, a three bedroom flat above a bric-a-brac shop not far from Ray's house, but when I showed Alison the Estate agent's photograph she reacted as though I'd suggested she pose for the Readers' Wives section of Whitehouse.

"I'm not living over a shop, Jimmy." Her face was hanging aghast."I want a proper flat."

"This is a proper flat," I argued, somewhat limply, it has to be said. I could plot and scheme until the cows came home but the final decision would rest with Alison. I had to accept that or start looking for a place of my own."It's detached."

"So?"

"So..." So the neighbours wouldn't complain about my guitar playing."So nothing," I sighed."Can I have that last Opal Fruit?"

In March we moved into a brand new flat on the Ingles estate. It had two bedrooms, a bathroom, a small sitting room and a square kitchen. Alison's parents gave us the extra money we needed for a deposit, with a little left over for a new effects peddle for my guitar. I won the peddle in a straight wrestling match - peddle versus curtains for the kitchen. I think Alison expected me to throw the match but I really needed that peddle; I needed it badly enough to twist my girlfriend's arm so far up her back that it made her cry. Even then I didn't relent until she screamed,"Submit!". I felt guilty enough to suggest that the match be decided over three falls, two submissions or a knockout, but not guilty enough to give her the damn curtains. The end would justify the means, I thought.

In the same month that I finally flew the nest and joined the world of mortgage-paying grown-ups, Annie left the band. Her short stay had been an unhappy one for all of us, not least of all Annie herself. I don't blame her for any of the tension and conflict that arose after she joined. It was too soon after Megan's departure for one thing; add to that the fact that Megan hadn't actually resigned from the band and what you have is a recipe for division and all the back-stabbing subversion that goes with it.

Annie's short affair with Larry seemed a convenient place for the rest of us to hang the blame but in reality it was just the tender head on a very angry boil. Megan only discovered the affair after a letter, typed and unsigned, was sent to her at her parents' address. My suspicions immediately fell on Paul, for not only did he have the motive (obsessive, unrequited love for Megan) but he also had ready access to a word processor at the Housing Office where he worked as a clerk. I didn't have a typewriter and wouldn't know where to find one if I needed to. It was always possible that Ray had bumped off a branch of WH Smith's at some point, but he didn't really have a motive that I could see. Which left only Elliot, if you discount the players themselves that is. Elliot probably had the means - I'd seen a sinister-looking antique typewriter at that folly of his - and a slim motive if that brief and largely unsubstantiated affair with Megan a couple of years before was any kind of motive. However, my money was staying on Paul. Typing an anonymous letter was about as confrontational as Paul got.

Annie's departure would have been fairly easy to recover from if it hadn't coincided with a change in Ray's behaviour. I was aware of trouble at home of course, following my confidential chat with Kat on New Year's Eve, but I was also happy to maintain the status quo so long as Ray didn't bring any trouble on the band. But unfortunately his time-keeping and reliability became even more erratic, and his general feeling towards us turned such that in his best of moods he was indifferent, at worst intolerant. I decided I would need to act soon or risk losing everything.

"So where do we go from here?" Paul asked. He was flicking through our meagre collection of CD's, mostly light soul compilations of Alison's choosing; she wouldn't let me have the vinyl collection in the front room because she said it made the place look too much like my old bedroom.

"Let's just carry on as a five-piece for the time being," I said ( here we were discussing Annie's departure and not Ray's precarious position in the band)."The last thing we need right now is another new face."

"Yeah, too much trouble," Paul agreed. He was blissfully content for the time being, which was one less thing to worry about."So, have you written anything lately?"

"Been busy with the flat," I told him."Alison's always finding jobs for me to do."

"What about that instrumental stuff you were working on?"

"I've tweaked it here and there."

"Can I hear some?"

I glanced at the wall clock. Alison was due home any time now, and if she found Paul here again there would be a cold shoulder for me to sleep against tonight. She liked Paul well enough - in fact I'd say he was her favourite out of all my friends - but his frequent visits to the flat had ceased to be a source of amusement to her. Now she considered them an irritating interruption to our domestic routine.

"Another time," I said.

*************

We were still getting most of our gigs through the Bands Wanted section of the local free paper and by word of mouth. This was fine for a band just embarking on its first tentative steps to fame and fortune, but after almost three and a half years of playing tiny pubs with dodgy PA systems and flashing disco traffic lights, I thought we were ready for bigger and better things. So in April I approached another local management company, Renwick International. The owner and sole agent was David Renwick, a serious man in his early thirties who dressed in designer suits and drove a flashy Porche 911. Those were all the qualifications I needed to see, but unfortunately David Renwick was a little more discriminating. He would only consider representing us if our professional demo tapes were a considerable improvement on the sixty or so others he had in his office.

I went away and spoke to the others. Between us we could just about raise enough cash to re-string our guitars; a few hours of professional studio time was out of the question.

"I bet Ray could come up with the cash," Paul said despondently."Ray always has cash."

Needless to say Ray was absent on this occasion. I'd tried his home number and even phoned his dad but neither he nor Kat knew his whereabouts.

"We'll have to start saving up," I said."All of us. In the meantime I'll try and work on Renwick some more."

Which is precisely what I did. I phoned his office at least twice a day, wrote several long letters explaining who we were and what our aims were, and eventually he relented and agreed to come and see us play live.

"If something else comes up I'll have to leave," he warned."And if something else comes up before I leave home I shan't be there at all."

In light of what happened at the White Swan that night I would have preferred him to remain absent.

We held a rehearsal session at Elliot's house two nights before the gig. I left a message with Kat because I couldn't reach Ray and didn't want to be left standing outside his dad's lock-up if he wasn't going to show. He arrived at Elliot's place over an hour late with only his acoustic guitar.

"I've got a new song," he said."I started writing it last year but I've only just finished the lyrics."

He then played what I can only describe as an extraordinarily offensive song called When The Irish Came To Town. The anti-IRA sentiment I could understand and even shared, but the lyrics of Ray's song clearly damned the whole Irish race and its culture.

We'd all be better off without you, the chorus went. We'd all be better off without you, so let's send the bombs back home.

But perhaps even more disturbing was the sheer hatred and venom in Ray's voice. He meant every single word he was singing.

When he finished he put the guitar down and looked at our astonished faces.

"Well fuck you then," he said simply."I'm playing it whether you like it or not."

And that's exactly what he did. Midway through our gig at the White Swan - and with Renwick watching from the bar - Ray diverted from the agreed running order and started to play his new song. It went through my mind to put a stop to it, either by encouraging the others to bully out Ray's voice with something hard and fast, or by physically stepping in and ordering him to quit , but I couldn't risk causing a row on stage with so much at stake. All I could do was stand back and pretend it was part of the show. There was always a faint hope that nobody would understand the lyrics, but that immediately evaporated when a beer bottle flew past my face and crashed dramatically into one of Elliot's symbols.

There was a commotion at the back of the room as a small group of men (the Kelly brothers, from Kelly Brothers Auto Wreckers, plus a few friends, it later transpired ) tried to break through to the front. This resulted in a couple of fringe scuffles incidental to the main event, which needless to say was swift and chaotic. I remember Ray throwing his guitar aside and meeting the first Kelly brother with a flurry of lightning punches. He was quickly set upon by at least three men, one of whom, I think, was Larry. I can't be certain if Larry was trying to help Ray or merely taking the opportunity to settle an old score, because at that point an unseen fist rattled against the side of my face and I immediately ducked behind an amplifier, where I remained until the police arrived.

*************

We were all arrested and spent the night in police custody. The following morning Ray and two of the Kelly brothers were charged with affray, while everyone else involved was given an official caution. Absurdly proud of myself, I waited in the car park of the police station for Paul and the others to come out.

"What did you get?"

"Caution."

"Yeah, me too."

"Bastard pigs."

"Yeah, bastards...Can I tell my mum I slept at your place?"

Ray was the last to emerge but he sloped away without saying a word to anyone.

"Throwing another moody," Larry noted. He was nursing a black eye and swollen lip. I had a faint red blotch on my cheek but Paul and Elliot had come through the battle completely unscathed."That time of the month again."

"You can't really blame him," Paul said."I mean, he's got a lot to be angry about."

Both Larry and I turned on him in disbelief."Well I blame him," I said."I know his kid died and everything but that was nothing to do with us. He had no right to sing that fucking song after we'd told him we didn't want to play it. He's gone and blown it for us now, hasn't he?"

Paul replied with a sulky shrug.

"We ought to have it out with him," Larry said, and then looked at me expectantly.

"Don't worry," I told him."I'll sort it."

**************

It was over a week before I managed to catch up with Ray. I phoned his house a number of times but on each occasion Kat confessed that she didn't know where he was, only that he wasn't at work. Our conversations grew longer and more intense with every call, and not always were we talking about Ray. By the end of the week an illicit thrill had crept into these virtual liaisons, and I began to anticipate them with the kind of preoccupied guilt and excitement I can only associate with a secret affair. Maybe the conversations themselves were innocent enough but they contained a lot of subtext that I didn't want Alison or Ray to decipher.

"Is Ray home?" I would always begin.

"No, he's not home," Kat would always reply. And then with a clandestine urgency in her voice that quickened my heartbeat: "What about Alison?"

But what did it all mean? I didn't know, and that was the most exciting part of all. I was secure enough to come right out and ask when she was finally going to let me get on top of her and move up and down a bit, but if I said something like that it would instantly eject both of us from the fantasy. I wanted that undeclared desire to remain strong between us because it made me feel intoxicated and alive and all the rest of that corny shit you feel when you first fall in love.

I went over to Ray's house one evening when Kat and Alison were at the swimming baths. His van was parked in the street and a light shone from a crack in the living room curtains, so he must have been home, but despite braying heavily on the door he refused to answer. I stepped back and looked up at the bathroom window. Kat had told me that she made Ray take a bath the minute he walked through the door because he always stank of paint and white spirit. But the window was unlit, so I figured he was either at the pub or playing silly games with me. As a last resort I opened the letter box and yelled his name. I had already decided to give up on him when the door opened and Ray stepped into the garden, closing the door behind him again. He appeared slightly nervous and not very pleased to see me.

"Jimmy?"

"I thought you was out," I said."Been knocking for ages."

"I was busy," he said flatly."I've got company, Jimmy. I can't really talk right now."

"A bird?" I asked. Not so long ago I would have posed that same question with laddish glee in my voice and not the sour suspicion we both recognised now, but then again not so long ago we were different people.

"So what if it is?"

"Nothing," I said quickly."It's nothing to me."

"Then don't look at me like it is."

There was a menacing quality in his voice that chilled me. I think he saw it on my face because he mellowed at once, but he was still too tense and preoccupied to relax.

"Our kid's here," he explained."And some of his mates. Call me tomorrow, eh? We'll talk about the band then, if that's what you wanted."

"Sure," I said. He didn't go back inside the house until I was on the street.

The next evening I called again. This time he was just arriving home from work in the van. He got out and slammed the door. He looked tired and stressed out.

"Don't give me any shit about that gig," he said before I had a chance to open my mouth."I've had a gutful from Kat, and I'm just about to go in and take some more, so don't you start on me."

"I just want to know what you intend to do, Ray, that's all."

"Do?" he asked sharply."Do about what?"

"You know, about staying or leaving."

For a moment or two I feared he might hit me. There was a dumb, bullish fury in his eyes and his hands had curled into tight balls by his sides.

"Jimmy!" he uttered with clenched exasperation. Then he gripped both my shoulders and squeezed until I nearly buckled and wilted; I think that's what they call temper displacement."I come to the band to get away from real life. I don't want all that involved shit, okay?" He let go of my shoulders and just stared tiredly at my face."I know you take it seriously. So did I, but a lot's happened since the baby died. I've kind of lost sight of the point."

"The point of what?"

"The point of everything, Jimmy." He patted my shoulder and walked to the door. He paused, about to turn the handle, his head hanging so low it was resting against the wood."I can't say what I'm going to do because I don't know what I want. If I'm in, I'm in. But if I'm out..." He went inside and closed the door.

I saw him again a few days after. It was the middle of the afternoon, and I was slumbering on the settee, unwashed and still in my uniform; I slept like a cat since becoming a postman. I worked from four in the morning until twelve-thirty in the afternoon, six days a week, and by twelve thirty-three I was usually sound asleep. Everyday I would unplug the telephone so that Alison couldn't ring me from work to assign me important chores such as fetching milk or drilling holes in some or other wall, and every evening she came home and scolded me like a child for it. She couldn't understand why I slept so much, largely because she held a self-related misconception regarding my schedule and the actual number of hours that I spent at work. She somehow managed to muddle her own working arrangements with mine, and because she worked in a cosy office from nine-to-five, and I was home by twelve thirty every afternoon, it was logical for her to assume that I must only be at work for three and and a half hours a day - so how come I was asleep? To set her mind straight I literally dragged her out of bed with me one morning. It was four AM, and she didn't know if it was Pancake Tuesday or Boxing Day. I marched her downstairs, ignoring her whiney, half-coherent protests, and almost managed to throw her outside in the rain before her eyes snapped open and she dashed back to bed. That evening she arrived home in a sulky, cantankerous mood and fell asleep in front of the Six o'clock news. There was only one thing I could do: I shook her awake and asked her to pop down for some milk.

While it did me the world of good, amazingly this brand of shock therapy did nothing to cure Alison's illusion, which is why I continued to unplug the telephone in the afternoons.

A hammering on the door roused me from one of my deep, dream-filled slumbers. I lay there for a moment, half hoping that whoever it was would go away, half convinced that I had only dreamed there was someone at the door, when the knocking started up again. I struggled off the sofa and walked blearily to the door.

"Come on, Jimmy, you lazy twat!" a cheerful voice demanded, and I opened the door to find Ray grinning at me from beneath his paint-speckled cap.

"Do you ever get any of that stuff on the wall?" I asked.

"Now and again." His smile became one of reconciliation."Get the kettle on then."

I took two cups of coffee into the living room. Ray was standing by the television, his hands behind his back. I gave him his coffee, which he set down on the windowsill.

"Not on there," I said absently."It leaves rings."

He gave a sympathetic grin and slipped a coaster underneath the hot cup.

"Nice cups," he said."Moving in present?"

"We got a full table set from my Aunt Jean. I'll show you the plates later."

"Much later I hope."

We cracked up laughing. I was meant to be angry with him, but tell us that.

"Listen, Jimmy," he began."About the gig, and all that other stuff. Well, you know..." And then he put his hand out. I shook it, and that was that. Enough said.

We sat down on the sofa and watched the last ten minutes of a nameless black and white melodrama on television. A vaguely familiar woman in a flowing white gown was being chased through a gloomy mansion by her mad husband.

"Would you shag her?"

"Probably."

Ray nodded."Vulnerability has its attraction," he said.

I honestly don't know if he meant anything by that remark.

The film ended tragically. Ray said he had to get back to work, so I went with him to the door.

"You said something about recording a demo tape," he said."At the gig, remember?"

"It's going to cost too much. Alison won't wrestle again after the last time."

"Come again?"

"Nothing. Private joke. We're skint, Ray. Paul gives everything to his mother, Elliot spends all his money on drugs, and Larry won't part with any cash because he's saving up for a new car."

"Well-" Ray slipped his hand into the deep pocket in his overalls. I thought he was searching for the keys to his van, but instead he came up with an untidy wad of loose notes."Take it out of that. And if there's any change, get some decent coffee."

*************

A fortnight later we were in the studio. Get this - cutting some tracks! We went in there all starstruck and giggly and came out again with throbbing headaches and frayed tempers; we were exhilarated but under no illusions about the work that lay ahead.

The recording studio was just a converted basement flat in Leeds ( only a stone's throw from Sandy's house, but I didn't go and visit her), but it was well known on the circuit for producing high quality demo tapes. We recorded, mixed and produced a whole album's worth of material in a little under six hours. I don't know if that's a record, but by the end we certainly felt as though we'd broken something.

Overall I was happy with the finished product. The guitar sound was too loud and crunchy, and the backing vocals could have been a little more polished, but that was all part of the learning curve and not something I dwelled upon. Naturally we made mistakes, and agreeing to capture the live band feel was the biggest of them. Next time I would be more forceful when it came to asserting the band's ideas over those of the producer.

That same evening we met in Elliot's drum room to assess the results in privacy. For once we didn't get stoned and drank very little. We listened with sober concentration, only speaking in murmurs when it was necessary to point out something of interest to the others. Every now and then I would look at their faces, often pinched and anxious, sometimes cautiously satisfied, and my belief in our inevitable destiny was renewed.

***************

I made plenty of copies of the demo tape and posted one of them to David Renwick. I sent it by recorded delivery and enclosed a note apologising for our last gig turning into a bloodbath. At least he would remember us.

Further copies of the tape were dispatched to various record companies, radio disc jockeys, rock stars, agents and managers. To make our tape stand out from the millions of others sent in by hopeful bands we paid a print company to design and produce a cover. They were cheaper than the company Larry worked for but it was still an expense we couldn't afford. Luckily Ray could.

We gave the tape a title - Phoenix - but we never referred to it as an album, at least not out loud. It was still a great feeling though, especially when we started selling the tape at gigs and people were coming up to us and telling us how great we sounded in their cars. On a few occasions we were even asked to sign the cover, and we always obliged with solemn appreciation and deep humility.

In early August we were booked to play our first all ticket gig in the recently refurbished private function room above the Duke. It wasn't quite a sell-out ( some of the tickets were given away as prizes in the Tuesday night trivia quiz ) but the thrill of seeing the words Tickets Only stamped across our posters was enough in itself.

"Next time it says Sold Out," I told Paul on the eve of the concert.

"Sold Out," he repeated, gazing at the poster with child-like wonder and excitement."You know, all these people will be coming just to see us play. I mean, some people came to our other gigs for that reason, but most of them were in the pub anyway. This time it's like..."

"It's for real," I said, and he nodded earnestly.

"When I first heard the demo tape I couldn't believe it was us. I knew what we sounded like from the stage, but listening to the tape was like listening to a different band."

I knew what he meant because I'd experienced the same feeling. It happens sometimes when you walk into a bank or electrical retail shop and suddenly realise that the face on the video monitor you're staring at is your own. But even that isn't close enough. Maybe a closer comparison would be all those baby photographs your mother keeps for the sole purpose of embarrassing you in front of your new lover: you know the baby in the photograph is you because your mother says it is - and it even looks a bit like you - but at the same time it isn't you, can't be you; you were never that pure, never that good.

Ray was supposed to collect everyone from their homes on the evening of the concert. I telephoned him the night before to make certain that he hadn't forgotten, and he laughed at my fussiness.

"Be cool, Jimmy," he said."I'll be coming on time, just like I always do."

I should have pointed out that he didn't always, especially not lately, but instead I trusted him and he went and let me down. When he was ten minutes late I was still willing to blame the traffic or some other minor inconvenience, but ten minutes turned into half an hour and half an hour into forty five minutes, and every time the telephone rang it was Paul or Larry asking me if Ray had turned up yet.

"I wouldn't fucking be here if he was!" I snapped back after Paul's third phone call. I could almost see him blinking in that surprised and hurt way."Just keep calm."

I ordered a minicab and collected Paul and Larry myself. Luckily most of our gear was already at the Duke but we still had to squeeze some of the instruments into the back of the car.

"Lucky we took most of our gear yesterday," Paul noted.

"Fuck off, Paul."

We were over an hour late by the time we arrived and unloaded. Although we could still make the scheduled starting time if we put an extra log on the fire, I had been relying on that spare hour to go through a final sound check and iron out a few creases in the set. It was lucky that I had planned the schedule with this in mind, otherwise the audience would be leaving right now instead of taking their places.

"It's lucky you-"

"Yeah, shut up, Paul and give Elliot a hand."

Elliot had made his own way. He was sitting on the kerb with his drum boxes around him, looking like a refugee.

Five minutes to go and Ray still hadn't arrived. We were on stage by now, huddled around the drums in darkness.

"You were supposed to sort this," Larry complained."You said you'd sorted this out."

"Oh right, it's all my fault."

"Well it's your fucking band, Jimmy. You're the leader."

I thought back to that night Paul and I had gone to see Annie perform in Leeds, how I had emphatically denied leadership of the band and any aspirations to become its leader, but Paul had known me better than I knew myself. It seemed that I had gradually taken control of the band after all.

"I'm singing," I said decisively.

"You can't sing," Larry scoffed.

"Do you want to do it?"

Silence.

"Shut up then. I'm doing lead vocals but I can't fill Ray's guitar parts. You'll have to work a bit harder, Larry."

"How?"

"I don't know! Fucking improvise. You're a musician aren't you?"

I was too fired up to feel nervous about singing. Besides which I knew that Larry was wrong: I can sing. I'm not a singer, but I can sing. It would do.

I signalled for the stage lights to come on. A cheer went up from the crowd, and I knew that I could not turn back now. There was something insistent and compelling in that cheer (and in every greeting cheer) that would not let me leave without performing. I would stand here alone under the spotlight, just me and my guitar, if the others didn't have it in them, but one way or the other the show was going on.

"Evening," I said."Ray's not coming tonight so you'll have to make do with me."

I was good that night. I think the success of my performance was partly down to the flight or fight response, but the rest of it was because I had been given a chance to live out a fantasy. We all want to sing, we all want to be singers. Even the drummers and bass players and rhythm guitarists who say they're just happy to be absorbed into the sound secretly yearn to be a singer, if just for one day.

**************

I phoned Ray's house after the gig but there was no reply. It was then that I began to feel worried - and worried about Ray's well being rather than worried for the band. It never occurred to me that he might have had an accident, or that Kat might have had an accident.

"Take me over there," I said to Elliot, but he had already loaded his gear into the Mini and I couldn't fit in.

"Phone Alison," Elliot suggested."Kat might be with her."

"I'm not worried about Kat."

"I meant..."

Shit, I knew what he meant. He meant that Kat might know where Ray was, or if he was alive at least.

"Listen," I began, but Elliot just smiled sedately.

"Your business, Jimmy. Let me know if everything's alright."

I said I would, then went back into the Duke to phone home. Larry and Paul were talking with a small group of girls by the jukebox. I think it was the vampire crowd that Megan used to hang out with. Larry was halfway into some blond's knickers, figuratively speaking, but Paul had already floated to the fringe of the circle. Any minute now he would drift away unnoticed, either to find more suitable company or home to his mother.

I found some change and called home.

"Hey, it's me," I said when Alison answered."You haven't heard from Kat this evening have you?"

"She's here now," Alison said."She's pretty upset as it happens. Been crying for ages."

"Crying?" I was already imagining the worst: Ray killed in a horrible traffic accident. Ray in a coma after falling off a ladder at work."What's wrong?"

"Ray's been arrested."

"Jesus." I breathed a sigh that was a mixture of relief and disappointment."So who's he hit now?"

"Nobody as far as I know," Alison said sombrely."He's been arrested for armed robbery."

************

It was difficult to get any kind of information from Kat simply because she didn't have any, other than the fact that Ray, his brother, and possibly three other men, had been arrested by armed police earlier in the afternoon.

"Doing a robbery?" I asked. We were in our front room. Kat was sitting on the sofa, fragile and tearful, while Alison and I stood over her like anxious parents, firing questions and demanding answers.

"No, no. He was at work. His dad said he was leaving a job when three police cars came out of nowhere and stopped them. They must have been watching him all morning."

We turned on the local news at midnight. The report said that five men were helping police with their inquiries following an investigation into a recent armed raid on a security van.

"He wouldn't do that," Kat wailed softly."Ray wouldn't do that."

I thought of three things just then. One was that night I went over to Ray's house following the bust up we had at the White Swan. I remembered how tense he had been, how he had closed the door so that I couldn't see who was inside. I've got company, Jimmy. I can't really talk right now. And there was the money he gave me to book the recording studio, as well as the cash he gave us to pay for the design and printing of a tape cover. But most of all I thought of his eyes when I went to see him the second time, the way he had stared at me with dull, bestial fury. Oh yes, I could see those same eyes through the holes in a balaclava, staring down a stubby little sawn-off shotgun at some terrified security guard. I could see it all too clearly.

Ray appeared in court the next morning, still wearing the overalls he had worn to work the previous day, and confirmed that he was Raymond Myers of 22 Endercotte Terrace and that he understood the charges made against him. He was then remanded in custody for trial. Exhausted and bewildered, they led him down. I didn't see him again for three months.

************

There's an album by Supertramp called Crisis? What Crisis? I don't have it anymore, but if my memory serves me right the front cover shows a man sipping a cocktail on a sun-lounger while behind him a city is in ruins. I mention it because the months following Ray's imprisonment should have been trauma city as far as the band was concerned, but in fact we were all strangely unflapped. Not so strange, perhaps, when you consider that we had already lost two singers and been blown up by the IRA. However, there were questions to be answered - such as who was going to sing for a start. We held a meeting in the Duke a couple of days after Ray was remanded.

"Has anyone spoken to him?" I asked, and everyone shrugged and looked at each other.

"I don't know if you can," Paul said."Aren't you only allowed to make one phone call?"

Larry snorted."Not for the rest of your life, dummy. That's just when you get arrested."

Paul stiffened, indignant."Yeah, I know. I've been arrested before."

"He gets banged up for one night and he thinks he's fucking Papillon."

"Can we get back to the discussion," I said, tapping my finger on the table to bring a little order."First of all I want to say that I'm not pushing for this, but there's a job to be done and we've got to get on with it."

"You want to sing?" Larry said doubtfully.

"Hold on, I haven't finished yet. No, I don't want to be the singer, but on the other hand we won't find one by sticking a card on the notice board."

"But that's how we all got together," Larry interrupted.

"Yeah, and look how shit we were. We need to get out there and poach another band's singer, or at least advertise the job where some serious musicians will see it. Then we'll need to audition the applicants. And after that we'll have to bring whoever we choose up to speed. Do you see what I'm getting at?"

Larry nodded archly."You want to be the singer."

"Just until Christmas. We're booked to do at least one gig a week until Boxing Day. It makes sense to leave me up front for now, and in the meantime we can still be on the lookout for a permanent replacement."

"I vote for that," Paul said.

Larry made a face."I don't know, Jimmy. You can sing and everything, but you don't get me going."

"I said it was only temporary. We need to find a singer, but I won't risk another lay-off by choosing someone who isn't suitable."

"Like Annie," Paul put in.

I had to agree."Like Annie. I got it wrong that time. This time we get it right." I was thinking: And this time Larry keeps his dick in his trousers.

We took a vote, the result of which was that I was now the lead singer of Flamboyant Gesture.

"Hey, what about asking Megan to come back?" Paul suddenly said. Elliot smiled privately at me. We both knew that Paul had been waiting to ask that question ever since Annie left the band.

"Larry?"

Larry shook his head firmly."You can ask if you like but she'll say no."

Paul's shoulders slumped.

"You're all forgetting one thing," Elliot said softly. It was the first thing he had said all evening.

"What's that?"

"Suppose that Ray is innocent..."

They all looked at me. I thought about the possibility for a moment, then gave the only answer I could give.

"He might get found guilty anyway," I said."No point leaving anything to chance."

*************

So we went back on the road before the dust could settle at our feet. While I did alright on vocals - not great, just alright - it was immediately obvious that as well as finding a new singer we would also need to find ourselves a new lead guitar player; finding a guitar player who could also sing or vice versa was too much to hope for.

In November I received a letter from Ray. Not so much a letter as a brief note requesting my presence at Armley gaol. I went along one gorgeously ripe Autumn afternoon, a Visiting Order in my wallet, and got lost in an urban sprawl of council houses and industrial estates, until I suddenly found myself staring at the grim old gaol's daunting walls.

Ray looked surprisingly well, but then I imagine that prisons are less like the concentration camps than my fears would have me believe. Even Armley.

I sat down opposite Ray in a room full of other prisoners and their visitors, most of whom were wives and girlfriends. Over in the corner a big man with ginger hair was crying helplessly to a woman who had to be his mother.

"James Cagney," Ray said with a smirk."Did you ever see that film?"

"The one where he turns yeller as they drag him to the 'lectric chair?"

"No, the one where his mother visits him in prison?"

"What's the title?"

"I forget," Ray said."What did you bring me?"

"Tobacco, chocolate, NME, and some stuff that Kat put in there for you." I gave him the bag.

"I want you to have my Strat," he said."It's a good guitar. Best I've ever had. I know you'll look after it."

"You're not going to the 'lectric chair as well, are you?"

He smiled thinly."No, but I'm going down for a long stretch, Jimmy. Ten years."

"Jesus."

"That's what my brief has told me to budget for if I'm found guilty. There's some other stuff that might get me a reduction, but one way or the other I'll be eating the next few Christmas dinners in here or in Wakefield."

It took me a few minutes to absorb the shock. I just sat looking at him, amazed at how he could be so pragmatic about the whole affair. Faced with such a bleak future I was sure that I would be hanging from the back of my cell door by now.

"It's the only way to get through," he said quietly, as if reading my thoughts."I've got to face it head on, Jimmy. I'm in prison, and there's no running away from it, not literally or figuratively."

"So..."

"Yeah, I did it alright."

"But why? Was it the money?"

He smiled at me then, the kind of indulgent smile you give your kid when he asks a stupid question.

"I did it for the sport. Armed robbery's such a glamorous job. It's rock and roll. You get dressed up, fill your nose with coke, and on you go. It's performance crime. I saw how much fun our kid and his mates were having, and I wanted some. Life wasn't much fun after the bomb."

"What about the band? That's rock and roll, Ray."

"But not as we know it, Jim," he said with another faint smile."The band isn't fun anymore, is it? It hasn't been fun for a long time."

"I don't know what you mean," I said defensively."It's always been fun."

Ray shook his head kindly."Remember that night at Elliot's house, when we were listening to the demo tape?"

I nodded cautiously, not really sure if I wanted to hear this.

"I watched your face, Jimmy, and I know what you were thinking. You were thinking: Yeah, rock and roll, let's get behind the music.

I felt my cheeks redden.

"Do you know what I was thinking?" Ray looked at me with a strange sadness in his eyes."I was thinking: Why aren't we having fun? This is supposed to be fun, so how come nobody's laughing? That's what I was thinking. Take the Strat, Jimmy - use it to chase your dream; mine's finished. I'm awake now." He raised his eyes and looked around the visiting room."Yep, I'm awake."

***************

Little changed in the few months left of this year. I continued on lead vocals, and on those nights when we weren't performing I would go and see other bands with the aim of poaching a singer; sometimes I would take Paul or Elliot but more often than not I would go alone. Alison complained that I was spending too many evenings away from her, and my answer was to invite her out to see the bands with me. I don't think it was the compromise she was looking for but she started to accompany me anyway.

It was on one of these reconnaissance trips that I met up with a guitar player called Stuart Chisum. We knew Stuart and his band, Thankyou Doctor, from the local pub and club circuit. They were a bit too purist blues for my taste but I'd always had a soft spot for Stuart's playing. Not that I had a soft spot for Stuart himself, mind, because he was the kind of creepy moron I wouldn't sit next to on a bus if I could avoid it.

"His arms are too long," Alison said as we watched Thankyou Doctor perform one night."He looks weird."

"I'm not interested in making a model out of him."

"Look where the guitar is!" She laughed in amazement and pointed."It's almost down to his ankles. It's a wonder he doesn't trip over it!"

I gave her a nudge - keep quiet. She was right though: Stuart was tall and thin and ungainly and his arms were downright obscene. He was also in the habit of bumping into the other members of the band, largely because he played with his eyes shut the whole time. I once saw him blunder into their singer and knock him right off the stage.

Stuart joined us for a drink after the gig. He didn't have much to say for himself but he listened to my offer and said he might call me after Christmas. All the time I was talking he was staring at Alison with the creepy intensity of a demonic child. Needless to say we were both relieved when he left.

"Not him," she said, shaking her head at me."Not him."

"I might not have much choice, or much say come to that. If he auditions and the others like him..."

"Then he doesn't come over to the flat," she said."Not ever."

Just before Christmas I received a letter from David Renwick. In it he said he liked our tape but the songs on it weren't, in his opinion, strong enough to attract record company interest. He advised us to keep going and try again in a year or so.

"Patronising wanker!" I screwed the letter into a ball.

Alison tried to be sympathetic and encouraging, which I needed like toothache."It's something," she said.

I glared at her bitterly."It's nothing."

And then she muttered something and left the room. I'm glad she left the room the way she did, because If I'd heard her correctly I'm not sure that she wouldn't have left by the window. I'm pretty certain that she said: "It's only a hobby, Jimmy."

Like it's only a war. Like it's only a book, only a mountain, only a religion. Did she imagine that I had any say in my destiny? I'm driven by outside forces, dear, I wanted to say. It's not a hobby - you're my hobby, and being a postman is another hobby, but writing and performing music is my whole reason for being.

But that would have made me such a patronising wanker.

**************

We had a quiet Christmas, Alison and me. We ate a small but cheerful dinner at home, visited my parents in the afternoon, and went over to see Alison's parents on Boxing Day. I liked her dad. He was a typical dad - worked hard, slept a lot, never said much, transformed into a pleasant stranger at Christmas and birthdays. His name was Tom and he read a lot of paperback westerns. I'm sure he yearned to write them himself but he never let on. Her mother's name was Gladys, or Glad for short. On my very first introductory visit I had foolishly cracked that old joke about feeling Glad all over, and from that day on there was something immovable between us, a silly little something which nevertheless caused problems, like a piece of shrapnel which was gradually working its way through the system towards the heart. It wasn't the joke itself, only the fact that I had dared to make it before I had fully crossed that line of acceptance.

Like me, Alison was an only child, and Glad was not just protective of her, she was also jealous. Alison once told me that her relationship with her father, which was a close and affectionate one ( on Boxing Day, at the age of twenty five, Alison sat on her father's knee to open her presents), had always been the cause of silent animosity between her parents. Then I came along and took Tom's place in the chess match to decide who loved Alison the most. I think that, and not the Glad all over gag, was the real little something between us.

Everything went swimmingly on this particular visit until Glad - innocently, it has to be said - asked me when I was going to make an honest woman of her daughter. It was the kind of semi-serious remark all parents make: When are you two going to settle down? When are you going to give your dad and me a little grandchild to spoil? When are you going to stop borrowing money? And they had made such remarks often in the past ( or Glad had in any case), but for some reason Alison grew all moody and distant and we hardly talked for the rest of the day.

In the evening I went to see Kat. I told Alison that I was going to collect the guitar that Ray had given me, which was only half the truth. Alison didn't appear to be too bothered about what I did. She said she was going to have a bath with her new smellies and an early night.

The night was cold and clear and brittle as brandy snap, the kind of night that burns your ears and clears your head. Unfortunately it didn't clear mine. The longing I had for Kat was just as confusing and intoxicating as ever. When I arrived at the house I found that, just Like Alison, Kat had also taken a bath with her new smellies.

"Do all women do it?" I asked as she let me in.

She smiled and frowned at the same time."Do what?"

"Nothing," I said. "Just musing."

We were in the hallway. Kat was wearing a long thin cotton nightdress with nothing underneath. I could feel the heat of the bathwater steaming from her body. Her hair was damp and she smelled of fruit and something mysterious.

That night, I slept with Ray's girlfriend and took his best guitar.

*****************

Do you know how I justified my actions? I convinced myself that when Ray had told me to look after his guitar he was actually asking me to sleep with his girlfriend. I lay awake that night, next to Alison, and tried to remember exactly how he had put it.

Keep it warm for me, Jimmy...look after it, Jimmy...treat it - treat her - like a lady, Jimmy.

Something like that in any case.

Or maybe not, because after a fitful night I woke so filled with remorse that I decided to end the affair at the first opportunity. Alas the first real opportunity came on New Year's Eve, when Alison invited Kat over to our place for a small party. She looked so beautiful, and caused me such sickness and yearning, that I changed my mind.

It was a quiet party, and a bit pathetic compared to the lively and sometimes chaotic New Year parties we'd attended at Ray and Kat's house, but I suppose that's growing up for you. I didn't want to be alive at twenty five once, but here I was. The band would go on. I would forge bravely ahead, defying the swiftness of the changing wind like a stubborn balloon.

FIVE

A deejay friend of mine, John Mullins, called me up in January to ask if we were still looking for a singer. I told him we were, but if he was thinking about applying for the job himself he had better forget it. He laughed but I was serious. No dead heads, no wannabes, no casuals, and definitely - most definitely - no disc jockeys.

"There's a band playing at the Cornerstone tonight," he said."They're a big bluesy jazz-funk outfit from Manchester called Trump The Dumplin'. Have you heard of them?"

I had heard of them. They were big in Manchester, apparently, and somewhere like Salford or Preston.

"What the fuck is a bluesy jazz-funk outfit?"

"I don't know, Jimmy - I'm just reading off the promo leaflet. But listen, I saw this band about a six months ago, and I tell you now their singer is unbelievable. He's exactly what you're looking for."

"Right," I said. I was hardly wetting myself with excitement at the prospect of going to see yet another band, even if they were big in Bolton. Alison would make a song and dance about me going off again for one thing, and there was also Kat to deal with. As soon as she discovered that I had wasted an opportunity to sneak away from Alison on some hopeless spying mission I would surely suffer some form of aggravation. And there was no doubt she would find out because Alison would ring her up and moan about me.

"It's an all-ticket event," John was saying."Sold out days ago. But don't fret - I'll put your name on the door. Will you be taking anyone?"

"Probably," I said."Just put 'and guest' to be on the safe side."

"Sure," he laughed."You pop stars are all the same."

"You're good for my ego, John, if nothing else."

"Hey, speaking of ego, Jimmy. Guess what's the most requested track at the Blitz?"

John's Thursday Night Northern Blitz was a near legendry institution. It was currently playing at the Duke but over the last four years or so it had moved nomadically between half a dozen or so pubs in the town. It wasn't always on a Thursday either, and quite often John allowed a guest presenter to stand in for him, but it was still the Thursday Night Northern Blitz with John Mullins. It was the place to be if you liked such urban punks as The Jam and Clash and maybe even a little Sex Pistols from time to time. The music was all a bit Cockney cowboy to be coming under the heading of a Northern Blitz but John never worried too much about sticking to the rules. He didn't worry too much about pleasing the crowd, come to that, which is what I admired most about him. He played the records he wanted to hear and only ever compromised during the Most Requested slot, when he would play one or two tracks of someone else's choosing.

"I give in."

"Well it's still Going Underground, but running a close second is Sometimes Down by Flamboyant Gesture."

"Wow," I uttered. It was a genuine wow. Tolerating some beatnik combo playing in the corner of your local pub is one thing, quite liking the music is another, but having people love your song so much they will request it over the Ramones and the Buzzcocks and Clash is something else entirely.

"I've had people asking for the tape too," John said."I made some copies and sold them. You didn't mind did you?"

"Being bootlegged you mean?" I laughed to myself, thinking about those times when I used to crank up the stereo and fling myself around the bedroom to the sound of Keep Yourself Alive and Brighton Rock, a tennis racket for a guitar. There'd be a moment at the end of each song where I would be hanging midway between the breathless fantasy and the embarrassing truth, and that's how I felt when John confessed to bootlegging our demo tape. In a way I was still playing tennis racket guitar and would continue to do so until Flamboyant Gesture had a record contract and all the trappings of rock stardom."No, I don't mind, John. What's this singer's name, by the way?"

John gave a mysterious little chuckle."You'll find out," he said.

In the end I decided to take Elliot to the gig. I needed a gut reaction to the mystery vocalist and that would only come from him and me - Paul would worry about how he was going to fit in with the rest of us, and Larry would criticise him for not being female.

We were late arriving at the gig because Elliot's mini had finally decided to retire for good. All those years of carting Elliot's drum kit back and forth across the North of England had finally taken its toll on the old girl. With Ray in prison we no longer enjoyed the luxury of our own van, and Elliot's latest news was another painful reminder, if we needed one, that we were rapidly running out of ways to get ourselves and all our gear to the gigs. Taxis, lifts from friends, borrowed vehicles, shuttle trips in the mini, and once on the bus, were all inconvenient modes of transportation, if not to say risky, but invention was all we had in the kitty.

"Can't you sell some of that old furniture?" I asked Elliot as we went inside the Cornerstone."Some of that shit in your house must be worth a bomb."

He looked at me uncomfortably."It's not mine to sell. I'm only like the caretaker, Jimmy. That house and everything in it belongs to my parents. Well, to my grandparents, actually. I've got another idea though. Tell you about it later."

When it was quieter and he could hear me properly, is what he meant. I sometimes felt more sorry for Elliot than he would have appreciated. People who didn't know him very well thought he was taciturn and mysterious, but that was only because his hearing impairment didn't really allow him to participate in group conversations, especially when most members of the group were drunk or stoned and there was a heavy metal band playing in the background. If those same people could sit down and talk to him one-to-one, say in his drum room where he was most at ease and eerily in tune with every slight change in sound and vibration, they would soon change their minds.

It was noisy in the Cornerstone, buzzing with the kind of anticipative chatter that made me wish I was performing and not just here to spectate. The band came on as we were pushing our way through the crowd towards the front of the stage. There seemed to be a lot of them - too many in fact. I wondered what all of them were going to do. I counted eleven people in all, including a four-man horn section huddled together in one corner of the stage.

"Which one's the singer?" I put my hands on Elliot's shoulders and stood on tiptoes to get a better look. The stage looked liked it had been invaded after a casual invitation to anyone who could smack a tambourine, bang a bongo, or hold down a chord to come on up and join a band. I lost count after fifteen, because that's when the horn section kicked in with the intro to Soul Man, and an unprompted chant of Dean! Dean! Dean! Dean! exploded around us.

A young white man strolled casually into the spotlight with a cheap electric guitar slung against his back. His untidy ginger hair and up-to-no-good grin gave the impression that he had just jumped living and breathing from the pages of a small boy's comic. I was waiting for him to sing, but first came the dance, a shifty, shuffling little shoe-sliding routine completely out of time with the music. It was a nonsense thing really, something you might do if you were alone in the house, in an exceptionally good mood, and a Blues Brothers song came on the radio, but to listen to the crowd you would think it was Michael Jackson up there. A ritual, probably, but still spontaneous and completely uninhibited. And I loved it. I don't know why, but I loved it.

"Am I a soul man?" Dean called out, cocking a hand to his ear. The crowd tunefully sang back:"You're a soul man!" And from that moment on I was determined to move the earth and all its rocks in order to get that man in my band.

If you ever saw Trump the Dumplin' play live you probably thought they were great. I thought they were great, but a great spectacle. They were brash and funky and as lively and colourful as a circus troop, but musically speaking they were shite. Well, maybe shite's a bit unfair, but their arrangements were cluttered and messy and the band themselves lacked any kind of natural co-ordination. It worked only because there was so much going on that any individual mistakes ( and there were a lot of mistakes) were drowned out by the manic energy of the overall sound. And because Dean was the most unique talent I'd ever seen in the flesh. His voice was strong and his vocal range incredibly diverse. At times he sounded uncannily like John Fogarty, yet he sang Let's Stick Together with an emphasised deep warble in his voice that came at me like a graceful bull elephant.

"What do you think?" I asked Elliot after the show. We held back because a large section of the crowd had now swamped the stage to meet the band.

"The kid's a giant," Elliot said."Do you know who he makes me think of?"

"Jagger."

"Mercury."

"John Fogarty."

"James Brown."

We both laughed. We didn't even know his full name yet and here we were comparing him to the likes of Freddie Mercury and Mick Jagger.

It was impossible to have a private conversation with Dean (whose surname was Fairweather, a gooey-eyed Mancunian groupie informed me) until the autograph hunters, well-wishers and tape buyers and gone home. Even then, with the extended band and its enterage still milling around and packing up their equipment, Dean was harder to pin down than a bluebottle. In the end I was forced to follow him into the gents and stick a tape in his jacket pocket while he was busy at the urinal.

"Listen to that," I said."My phone number's on the back."

He shifted onto one foot and squinted at me with alerted suspicion."What?"

"My name's Jimmy Connor," I said quickly. "I'm with a band."

Dean relaxed. He looked me over and nodded."Flamboyant Gesture, right? Good band. Saw you one time. I forget where. I'm not very good with dates and places. Faces and names, yeah, but not dates and places."

I wasn't surprised that he had heard of us - pleased of course, but not really surprised. We had been on the circuit for over four years now.

"We're looking for a new singer," I told him.

"You had two singers when I saw you, a bird with red hair and a mad bastard on guitar."

"They both left."

"Bit careless wasn't it, losing two singers?"

Just then the bog door opened and two men came in. I recognised one of them as being a quarter of the horn section.

"You'll be in touch then?" I whispered.

Dean gave me a private nod. I went out to find Elliot.

It was another six weeks or so before Dean Fairweather called me. Fearing that he wasn't interested I put an advert in the local paper for a singer and a lead guitar player. We got a lot of calls, mostly from people who had 'done a bit of singing' and thought it would be fun to play in a band. Needless to say these weren't suitable. But there were a few hopefuls, all of them with the relevant experience. To these I sent off a copy of our demo tape with instructions to learn three songs of their choosing, and to turn up at Elliot's place a week later for an audition. This narrowed the field down to three singers and just two guitar players.

The first singer we auditioned turned out to be better than we'd expected. His name was Gary something or other. As instructed he had learned three of the songs and sang them well. We told him to wait in the kitchen while we had a chat, and while we were chatting he made off with the fifty pence pieces that Elliot kept in a big coffee jar between the biscuits and the paper towels. Chalk that one down to experience.

Guitar player number one arrived with a flying-vee and a long Kiss perm. He hadn't bothered to learn the songs but did we want to hear him play anyway? No, not really.

Guitar player two was more my type, a quiet young man with a short haircut and spectacles, serious about his music and happy to accept instructions. His playing was clean and note-perfect.

"What's your name again?" I asked him, tracing my finger down a list of names I had hastily scribbled on a sheet of paper as his spotless white jeep pulled up outside Elliot's house.

"Simon Harman."

"Harman...Harman...there you are." There he was, right between Jeff Beck and Johnny Marr."So, what are your long term plans, Simon?"

"I'm going to join the army," he said, and as he spoke his shoulders went back, his spine straightened, his chin lifted, and it was plain to see that he could never be anything but a soldier. I should have seen it in his haircut and in the way that his guitar playing had withstood the most critical of inspections.

"Great," I said, and smiled as best I could."We'll let you know."

We didn't let him know. I was disappointed that he hadn't worked out but satisfied my decision would prove to be the right one in the long term.

"He was okay," Larry said, perplexed."I don't see what was wrong with him."

"Nothing, there was nothing wrong with him. But he's already thinking about leaving, and that's not good enough. I wouldn't let Clapton in this band if he wasn't prepared to commit himself one-hundred percent."

There was no further argument. I was serious about the Clapton thing and they knew it. I might let him jump on stage and jam with us, but if he wanted to join us permanently he would have to stop making solo albums with Phil Collins.

The last two singers didn't work out either. One of them was a black kid called Devon Miles, who later went on to join the cast of Cats on Broadway. He was a terrific singer but it was the wrong sound for Flamboyant Gesture. I had to admit that while my heart was set on Dean Fairweather joining the band nobody else would come close.

I talked to Alison about getting a loan to buy a second-hand van to transport the band and our equipment to gigs but this time she put her foot down even though I offered to wrestle with one arm behind my back. My only other option was to get a loan from my union, deductible from my wage, but that would mean hiding my wage slips from Alison until I found the courage to come clean. I reckoned that cheating on her emotionally was bad enough without cheating on her financially as well.

Speaking of which, my affair with Kat ended in late February, which is when Ray's trial began. I went to see her a few days before Ray and the others were due in court, and she sat me down and explained with gentle, motherly concern that while she loved me, and would always love me, it was over. Rashly I told her that I would leave Alison and move in with her, and she just cried and shook her head over and over again until I stopped making promises.

There was no kiss goodbye, only pained smiles and the briefest of tender touches. It struck me, as I was walking away from her, that once Ray's trial was over and the faint hopes riding on it gone, there would be no reason for our paths to cross again. She and Alison were slowly drifting apart now that the common bond between them no longer existed. Accidental reunions would become less meaningful and poignant every time; she would gradually recede and become no more than a familiar face in a crowd of strangers, someone smiling from the bus queue; a girl I used to know. The thought filled me with sudden distress, and I almost flung myself back at the door. But I didn't. I just kept on walking, misery dragging me down until I began to feel like a man walking in a storm. I went home and told Alison that I had a bad flu coming on and I'd be better off sleeping on the sofa. The next morning I really did feel ill, so I called in sick and spent the day watching banal television in my underpants. This, I thought, is what becomes of the broken hearted.

**********

I didn't attend Ray's trial because it began on the day that Dean joined the band. I don't think I would have gone in any case. All things considered, It was better for my state of mind that I didn't see Kat while the wounds were still so fresh.

Dean arrived at Elliot's place in a clunky old Lada estate car sprayed black. It had a sticker in the rear window reading EAT MY LADA. He was more than an hour early but for some unfathomable reason immediately apologised for arriving late.

"I've got shit for brains," he said cheerfully."No good with clocks or numbers or anything like that."

"It's okay," I told him, chewing on my misgivings."We're ready to go if you are."

I took him up to the drum room, which was now our permanent rehearsal room. Elliot had recently offered to hire out the space to a few trustworthy bands we knew, the money going towards buying ourselves some form of transport.

I introduced Dean to the others.

"Did you learn three songs?"

"Sure. Learned them all, actually. It's a good tape. Good sound you've got."

"We'll do three numbers and then have a chat. We can always go over them again if you don't get it right first time."

Dean grinned at me as if he thought I was pulling his leg. He plugged his cheap guitar into a spare amp and sat down to tune it."Can you give me a C, Harry?"

"Larry. And it's an E you want."

"Thought you were good with names," I said.

"Faces and cars, Jimmy; no good with names." He tuned the bottom string on his guitar to B. "Got it."

"Shall I do it?"

He shook his head and put the guitar to one side. He looked at me and smiled crookedly."It's just a prop in any case. But then you knew that, didn't you?"

"I had a good idea. So what do you want to do?"

"Sometimes Down."

"And then what?"

"And then you ask me to join your band."

I looked at the others. Paul was blinking rapidly behind his little glasses, Larry's lip was curled into a sneer of derision, and Elliot hadn't caught a word. I was aware of something powerful and dynamic and just a little bit dangerous ripping its way into our world.

Dean picked up the lead mike and tapped the head delicately with the tip of one finger."Perfect," he whispered."Ready to give me the beat, boys? One-two-three-four..."

Nobody moved. We were all staring at him the way you would stare at a man who suddenly begins to remove his clothes in public.

"Elliot says one-two-three-four," Paul said. He was wearing the wounded, resentful expression of a child denied some promised treat."Elliot always says one-two-three-four."

"I didn't-" Dean lowered the mike and gazed at us with anxious uncertainty."I didn't know."

"No harm done," I laughed, trying to lighten the situation."Every band has its rituals. Elliot always counts us in for the first number. It's something we've always done."

Dean nodded cautiously."Right. No offence. It's just that you all look so...so fucking spooky."

Larry played the theme from Twilight Zone. We all laughed, as much at our own intensity as anything else. But Dean was right - it was a spooky moment. For the first time I was made to realise how daunting it must seem for someone from the outside to try and break into our circle. I wasn't just thinking about Annie or any of the hopefuls who had recently auditioned with us, but also about Alison and Kat and the few girlfriends that Elliot had brought along for us to meet. It was now clear to me that he hadn't simply brought them along to be introduced - he had brought them to be vetted. And they had failed, which is why he was single. The others, the ones we never got to meet, probably felt it was better to leave him rather than face the ordeal of having to romance the band as well as the man. I wasn't sure where Alison figured in this theory, or Megan come to that. Megan hadn't once dropped by at rehearsals to say hello and catch up on the news, and neither had she been to any of our live shows. I found that strange, because even if she still harboured some bitterness or resentment at the way I had sneaked her out of the back door without ever discussing the future with her, Larry was still her lover. The more I thought about it the more unusual it seemed that she had never once come along to support her boyfriend. That went for Alison too, who was no more than an occasional fan and something of a reluctant one at that. Yet while all of this was going through my mind it suddenly occurred to me that after all the arguments, the missed holidays, the late nights and the casual neglect on my part, she had never once asked me to leave the band. And where would we be if she had?

Elliot counted us in. Dean sang Sometimes Down, and then She's Not To Be Trusted. After that we did three more songs from the tape, plus a couple of Credence numbers, and then just about every other song we knew. We played all afternoon and well into the evening, ending with a rendition of Heroes that sent a chill down my spine and made me feel like crying.

Sometimes - maybe only once in your life - the pieces fit together so sweetly you can hear them click. That's what happened at Dean's audition. Nobody asked him to join the band because there was no need to. He was here because he belonged. It was like finding Jesus.

There was a message from Alison on Elliot's answering machine ( a Christmas present from me), which we didn't discover until after nine. I called home, humble apologies at the ready, but she was in a placid mood and even sounded pleased when I told her we had finally found the right vocalist.

"I wasn't checking on you," she said."I just thought you might want to know how Ray got on in court."

Ray...I had completely forgotten about Ray.

***********

The trial lasted for a week and a day, which is a week longer than most people were predicting. After that the jury took less than half an hour to find all five men guilty as charged. I was in court for the verdict but felt uneasy about returning the next day to hear the sentencing. It seemed an unnecessary intrusion into a private indignity, even voyeuristic.

"I think the judge should call them into his office one by one and tell them in private," I said to Alison.

"It's not like being ticked off by the headmaster," she said."Justice must be seen to be done. I think Ray wants us all to be there for him."

"Why?"

"Because if you're going to break down it might be best to do it in front of your friends."

"Ray won't break down."

"Because he's a man?"

"Because he's resigned," I said."Ray's been sliding towards this for a long time. Being in the band and having a baby to look after halted that for a short time, but you always end up where you're going."

"And where are we going, Jimmy?"

We were at home, curled up on the sofa with one of Alison's sickly soul compilation albums on the stereo. I had been expecting this question for a long time but I thought it would come at the end of an argument or as a recoil to the next big let down I inflicted upon her, not when we were cuddled and drowsy with our scented candles from Ikea burning in their brass holders and Michael Bolton crooning us to sleep.

"You and me?"

She turned her head slightly and gave me what I think was her Robert De Niro face."Well I'm the only one here."

"George Formby?"

She wrinkled her nose at me - funny old me - and started to scratch gently around my belly button with her fingernails.

"It's just that we've been together for over three years now."

"I know. It's been great hasn't it?"

"Yeah, yeah. But I thought you might have married me or something by now."

"Do you want to get married?"

"Is that a proposal?"

"No...yeah...well, I mean...I don't know."

She laughed kindly at me."Don't know what you want, do you, Jimmy Dean?"

"I love you though," I said, hoping that alone might be enough to satisfy her for the time being.

"Oh yeah?" She twisted around, graceful as a kitten, and rested her chin on my chest. Her eyes were probing and intense but not completely without humour."So why do you sleep with all those other girls?"

"What other girls?"

She shrugged."Rock and roll, Jimmy. All those pubs and clubs you play at, all those girls in tight little skirts making eyes at you...You must have done something you're ashamed of."

"What brought this on?"

Another shrug, and then she squirmed and wriggled her way up my body until her mouth was only an inch from mine.

"You've got your randy head on," I said, and she laughed huskily and nibbled my bottom lip. Right now, I thought, I would give her anything in the world except the truth.

"What's the matter, Jimmy? You look tense…"

"Tense?" I did that thing she loved, that thing with my little finger, and she writhed and twisted against me, her eyes closed and her breath leaving her body in a shuddering moan of rapture. Tense? I was fucking rigid.

**************

Ray's brother got fourteen years, a sentence of such unexpected severity that shocked whispers of 'fuck me' were heard around the courtroom, one of them clearly emanating from the council for the defence, or from that direction in any case.

Kat's hand went to her mouth and those large dark eyes of hers looked very afraid. I glanced at Ray and saw a pale, sickly cardboard cut-out of the electric guitar hero he was before. Suddenly I wanted someone to blame - the IRA, his parents, or even Kat and the pressure she was putting him under at the time he turned to crime. There had to be someone to blame; I couldn't accept that life was just a platter of shit sandwiches, one after the other.

Three men, none of whom I knew, then received sentences ranging from nine to eleven years.

Sentence on Raymond Myers was adjourned pending psychiatric reports.

**************

The band played on. We played our first gig with Dean on the day that Ray returned to court. Last minute rehearsal prevented any of the band from attending the hearing, but Alison took the day off work and went in our place. I phoned her from Elliot's house just as darkness was falling and we were preparing to load our gear into Dean's Lada and Larry's new used Toyota.

"He got four years," she said."That's not too bad, all things considered."

Not bad really, considering that he was also lumbered with severe depression and posttraumatic stress disorder.

I called the others together and broke the news. Dean lit a cigarette and quietly distanced himself, while Larry, Paul and Elliot stood limp and shaken.

"Was it the bomb?" Paul asked after some moments.

Larry glanced at him with tired impatience."What else could it have been, Paul?"

"I don't know..." Paul looked at me, blinking."Was it?"

Larry sighed deeply and shook his head. He was about to say something else, something that might have stung Paul to tears, but I interjected.

"Easy. We're all a bit fucked up over this."

"We should have seen it coming," Elliot said, suddenly finding something interesting to look at on the driveway. "We were meant to be his mates."

"We were his mates," I said firmly."Are, I mean. But we don't always know what's going on in each other's lives."

"That's because we're not really mates," Larry said. He looked at me frankly."We just work together, right?"

"No."

"No," Paul echoed.

"We'd help each other out if it came to it."

Larry sneered."Bollocks, Jimmy. We didn't help Megan out. We didn't wait for Megan to work her problems out. We didn't rally round to support Annie. And we did fuck all to save Ray. We just work together."

He went back into the house, leaving the rest of us to pick up the guilt.

"I'd help out," I said.

Paul nodded."So would I."

"Elliot?"

"What?"

"If any of us had a problem would you help them sort it out?"

"Sure," Elliot said."If I could. If they told me what it was, and I could help, then I would."

"Dean?"

"Sure I'd help, Jimmy."

"Would you be able to tell the rest of us if you had a problem?"

"I'd like to think so."

"Have you?"

He thought for a moment and finally shrugged."Got a bit of a toilet problem...but that's not what you mean is it?"

************

Dean settled into the band much more quickly than we grew accustomed to him and his ways. At first I fought hard to bring him into line, to force some kind of order and routine into his muddled life, but it was like trying to teach a cat to sit. Dean just didn't have the same concentration capabilities as the rest of us. During the summer months, when we were playing every other night or so, Dean would often come home with me or Elliot rather than drive all the way back to Manchester. He could sit for hours on end listening to my stories about the band and all the troubles we had come through, but if I tried to give him any information or dates concerning forthcoming gigs he would pick up a newspaper or simply walk away to rifle through my album collection. This frustrated me no end, not least because the information I was trying to get through his skull was usually important. As a result he was always very late or incomprehensibly early. When he did arrive on time it was occasionally to the wrong meeting place, or the wrong venue (and once, famously, in the wrong town ), and yet somehow, by the god of absent-minded fools, he never missed a show.

In the end I gave up trying to tame him. We had an erratic talent on our hands, our very own own Crazy Diamond, and to stifle that talent in any way felt like suicide. The only thing we could do was lean into the corners with him and hope we didn't all fall off.

One of Dean's more infuriating habits was to walk off stage midway through a number. Sometimes he would call to me: "Jimmy, moff forra piss!" And off he would go. Other times he would take a fancy to a girl in the audience and go down to chat her up. Mind, he always waved at us.

After the forth or fifth show we became wise to this and secretly rehearsed extended instrumental breaks for all our songs. At the same time we added a wad of sticky labels to the list of vital equipment, then if we wished to remind Dean of something we would simply write it down and stick it all over his car and that cheap guitar he couldn't play.

It was Dean who suggested that we enter a Battle Of The Bands competition organised by Sony and Dixons. The final was to be held in London in January of next year, but before that there were a number of local and regional heats to get through. The top prize was a whole shit load of musical equipment and studio time, but perhaps more importantly it was an opportunity to by-pass the feeding-time frenzy and get ourselves noticed by the people who counted.

The first preliminary round was held in the gymnasium of a local high school one steamy evening in the middle of August. Each band got twelve minutes on a slippery stage with no lighting other than the dicky fluorescents in the ceiling, just long enough to play three songs without passing out from the heat. By the time we went on the hall felt like a boxing arena after a dozen bouts. Our twelve minutes passed in a sickly blur of rising heat and thumping drums. I remember nothing except looking up during Sometimes Down to see Dean waving from the top of the wall-bars, but I may have been hallucinating.

We took refuge from the tropical humidity in one of the changing rooms. I was sick in the showers, and when I came back a man from Dixons was congratulating Dean.

"We won," Larry said, without much surprise.

"Great," I said, and promptly fainted.

Flamboyant Gesture went back for an encore and performed without me for the very first time. Dean played guitar, and according to Elliot, It was a blessing that I was still unconscious.

*************

Larry invited me for a night out to celebrate his birthday, something I usually avoided owing to the number of people out to kick Larry's head in at any given time. This was in September, and I suppose I agreed to go out with him only because the threat of running into a pack of jealous boyfriends and embittered ex-lovers was still safer and a lot more fun than staying home with Alison. We had planned to take a last minute package holiday at the end of the month but because the band had reached the third qualifying round of the competition ( one step away from the regional finals in Bradford) I told her the holiday was off. Larry's birthday was on the Friday, the day that we should have been losing our passports and arguing about all the hair-care products that Alison was taking.

Larry was never what I would call a great friend of mine. There was a lot of truth in what he said about us being thrown together by circumstance rather than clear choice ( although any one of us was free to leave the band), but I think that was true about him and me - and him and the rest of us - rather than all of us. I considered Elliot to be a good friend, and of course Paul was my constant shadow and had been for many years, but Larry was a workmate. We didn't often socialise outside the band, except for the occasional drink after practice or as a couples thing, and I couldn't ever remember him inviting me for a drink without the others being present. I sensed that he wanted to talk about something, and the more drinks we had the stronger that feeling got.

I thought he was going to tell me that he was leaving. The question I had to ask myself was how much resistance I was prepared to put up. Larry was a good musician, a reliable and valued member of the band, but not irreplaceable. We had already demonstrated our ability to overcome the departure of more than one important member, and I was convinced that we would so again. The institution would remain standing no matter who passed through its doors.

In any event, that's not what he wanted to tell me. We were in the Duke, sitting at the same table where we had met before our first rehearsal ( almost five years ago now), when Larry told me that Megan had finally left him.

"Where's she gone?" It was the first question I could think of. Pretty irrelevant really, but then I wasn't sure how much I wanted to know.

"Where do they always go?" Larry said sourly."Back to her mother."

"Right." I took a few sips of my pint, searching my mind for a profound piece of wisdom with which to inspire him."Shit news, that."

Larry hummed in agreement."I don't think she's coming back this time, either."

"Is that what she said?"

"No." He stared mournfully into the bottom of his glass."That's how I know."

Larry went to the bar for more drinks, while I watched the new generation of Friday night Kouros boys knocking balls around the pool table. The Duke was changing - everything was changing. The faces were getting younger; their taste in music was alien. I wondered how long we could sustain as a pub and club band, how long before our fans decided that a night in watching the snooker was better than being knocked about in a pub full of teenagers. And how long before those teenagers demanded their own kind of music over the dinosaur rockers in the corner. There were a few lively young bands making the breakthrough from garage to stage, and while none of them were as talented as Flamboyant Gesture ( or as enduring - they seemed alarmingly fragile, like butterflies, with most lasting no more than a few months) they each came with their own small army of enthusiastic fans. If it wasn't for Dean ( Dean! Dean! Dean!) we would be struggling to find more than one decent gig a week in the current climate. But all that said, what goes around still comes around. Changes were just something to ride out, like IRA bombs and affairs and singers being sent to gaol.

Larry came back with refreshed pints and two large Southern Comforts.

"Do you remember what you said that time about none of us really knowing what was going on in each other's lives? I think you were right." Larry dropped the Southern Comfort in one gulp, then picked up the one I thought he had bought for me."I think most of the time we don't want to know. Too much shit of our own to cope with without being lumbered with someone else's. What I want to know is, would you be here if I wasn't in the band?"

"I wouldn't know you in that case," I said."I didn't know you before you joined the band."

"But say I'd left with Megan, and I phoned you up one night and said I had a problem, a big problem that I..." He paused there and stared meditatively into his glass."A problem that I didn't understand. I mean, what if there was something going on in my mind that..." He broke off again, this time to swill down the second double Southern Comfort."Ah, fuck it," he said with forced cheerfulness."Just tell me if Elliot slept with Megan."

"I don't know," I said. I was beginning to worry. I sensed a dark and fatalistic meaning to this conversation that was frankly scaring me."If I knew for sure I'd tell you."

"For sure?" He smiled cynically."Then you must have heard rumours?"

"Some. Does it matter now?"

Larry shrugged."I'm not about to kill Elliot if that's what's worrying you. I just want to know. It might take some of the blame off my shoulders if I knew she was going over the side as well." He took a drink of his beer and eyed me for a moment."Did you fuck her?"

"No, course not."

"What about Ray?"

"Leave it out, Larry."

"Paul?" He laughed into his beer, sending a wave of froth over the rim of the glass."No, not Paul."

"Look, maybe you should be speaking to Elliot if this is troubling you so much."

"It's no trouble, Jimmy," he murmured.

*************

I didn't know what to make of Larry's mood that night. I would have talked it over with Alison, and probably received better advice than I could give myself, but she was only speaking to me in the form of terse instructions: Get milk. Move feet. Tape Coronation Street. She mellowed when I met her from work one evening with a bunch of flowers and the confirmation letter from the hotel in Blackpool where I had booked a long weekend. We went in October, a few days after the Flamboyant Gesture won through to the regional final of the Battle of the Bands competition. It was wet and cold but the lights were great and we even managed to have our photograph taken with Freddie Starr.

On our return I discovered that Dean had borrowed some money from his parents and bought a clapped-out VW camper van, which he had hand-painted in groovy black and white swirls. He had even managed to incorporate an unofficial band logo - a black and gold phoenix playing an electric guitar with the name of the band painted in bright orange flame-effect. I hated it but I couldn't very well say as much, not after he had presented it to me with such pride and ceremony.

"What do you think?" I asked Elliot when Dean was safely out of earshot.

"I think we'll look like the kids from the Scooby Doo show," he said.

The final of the competition was held in the famous St George's concert hall in Bradford city centre. Years before Paul and I had seen Iron Maiden at this very same venue. This was before Bruce Dickinson joined the band, before they went Hollywood and sold more albums than Michael Jackson, but they were still a big-time outfit. Tangerine Dream also played here, as did James Taylor and Squeeze and Paul Weller and many other great artists. And now we were playing here too. So it was a competition and not our own gig, but tell us that.

More than one band froze that night, completely overcome by the atmosphere, daunted by the lights and the quality of the sound system, or simply awestruck by the size of the arena, but not us. We rose to the occasion and played the best fifteen minutes we'd ever played. And by the end of it we were bigger than the crowd, bigger than the sound system, bigger even than St George's hall. For fifteen minutes we were headliners, eclipsing all those who had come before us.

When the result was announced we went back on stage to a volley of flashbulbs and a rapturous greeting from the audience. As we loaded up for the encore, I squeezed Paul's shoulder and shook my other fist in victory. He gave me a smile of sheer bliss and gratitude.

"Tonight's winners!" The MC declared."Flamboyant Gesture!"

We did Travelin' Band, an old Credence Clearwater Revival song, and we did it better than them. Maybe not all the time, but that night we did. They showed about ten seconds of that bit on the Calender News show the following evening. We watched it at home, and when the clip ended Alison kissed me and told me she was proud of me. I made my mind up never to cheat on her again.

************

A few days after that show David Renwick telephoned me at home and offered to manage us. I had expected something to happen after winning our ticket to the final but so far nothing had. No local reporters knocking on the door, no managers eager to get their hands on a slice of our cake, and no record company bosses asking us to lunch at some swanky London diner. So my initial instinct was to bite David Renwick's hand off right there and then, but thankfully I held myself in check. I'd like to think it was a sensible business decision, but actually it was more childish than that. I just wanted to pay him back for ignoring us.

"Actually, we've already got a manager."

"Oh. Right," David Renwick said."Can I ask who it is?"

"I'd rather not say."

"Have you signed anything binding?"

"Legally binding?"

"Yes."

"No. We shook hands, that's all. It's more of a casual relationship."

"Right, right," Renwick came back, firmer now, confident."Look, Jimmy, don't do anything for the time being. Go away and have a think about it. Talk it over with the band, see what they say. This is an important time for you, Jimmy. You can't afford to be nice over this."

"I don't understand," I lied.

"Fire him," Renwick said."Come with Renwick International."

I told him we would think about it. He called again the next day and offered to put up the cash for another demo tape.

"You need to get in the studio with Dean Fairweather as soon as possible. What happened to your other man by the way?"

"He's in prison."

"Shame. He could play guitar. No reflection on your own abilities, Jimmy, but you need to replace him urgently."

"I'm working on it."

"Good. Shame you couldn't have both Dean and the old guitar player in the same line-up. How long did he get?"

"Four years."

"Forget him then. Get a new lead guitar player. I'll help you find someone if you get stuck."

Things were moving a little too fast. We hadn't even agreed to let him represent us yet and already he was paying for studio time and lining up new guitar players."This money for the studio...Is it like a loan or something?"

"I'll tell you what I'll do, Jimmy. I'll pay for the studio and take it back from the advance on your first album deal. No deal, no debt. How does that sound?"

"It sounds like we have a new manager," I said.

************

Elliot threw a party on New Year's Eve. He spent most of the evening guarding the antiques in the drawing room, but he did manage to tear himself away to join in the traditional jam session upstairs. We ended with our adopted anthem, Heroes, just like always. The singer might be different but the song remained the same.

And so we came to the end of another year, only this time there was no feeling of having completed a gruelling three hundred and sixty-five day race. This time our heads were down, the wind was at our backs, and we were sprinting out of the blocks and down a track which might have a few hurdles but no blind curves. This time there were no stragglers to wait up for. Flamboyant Gesture were sprinting all the way to London.

SIX

Shortly after the New Year holiday I traced Stuart Chisum to a bluesy cellar bar in Wakefield where his band, Thankyou Doctor, played a regular Tuesday night slot. I waved him over to my table during the interval. He studied me with that disconcertingly moronic stare before starting over, knocking a young woman's drink out of her hand on the way. She was livid and noisy with it, whereas Stuart carried on unawares, moving through the crowd with strange, giraffe like grace and oblivion.

"Good sound," I said as he sat down. Absently I steadied the table as his knees gave the legs a hard bump."You sound a bit like the Robert Cray Band."

He nodded keenly."It's coming together nicely. The new drummer's a bit slow but he'll catch on."

I looked across at the drummer, who was standing alone at the bar with the vaguely worried expression of someone who suspects he's got off the bus at the wrong stop."Where did you find him?"

"Erm, not sure really. Kind of out of the blue, Jimmy. I think he lives in a hostel or something. You know, one of those care in the community places. He carries all his stuff around in two Safeway bags."

"Even the symbols?"

Stuart didn't catch on. He was still staring at the drummer, the weight of his big jaw slowly drawing his mouth open."No, just his personal stuff. He keeps the drums at the studio."

"You've got a studio?"

"Just a room in an office suite. Everyone complains about the noise."

I decided that now was a good time to invite Stuart to join the band. My only other option was to tell the tedious, weird-looking bastard to get lost, and I'm afraid we needed him too much for that.

"Did you hear about the competition?"

"Oh yeah, congrats and that," he said."What's the next step then?"

"We play the Shepherds Bush Empire in about three weeks time."

He was hammered, dumbfounded, rattled, overwhelmed with envy and admiration, and managed to express all of this without altering his imbecilic face."Shepherds Bush Empire?"

"Yep."

"Fuck me."

"Well not right now, Stuart. I wanted to talk about the guitar sound."

"Mine?"

"Yours and ours. Ours is a bit flat at the moment. We want you to pump it up, if you see what I mean."

He didn't see what I meant. I explained our situation in terms he could better understand, and despite some misgiving he finally agreed to come along and meet the others.

"What should I tell them?" he asked, indicating the other members of Thankyou Doctor, who were now taking up their positions in readiness for the second set.

"Tell them London's calling."

***********

The following evening Stuart turned up at Elliot's house for an audition. Perhaps I do him an injustice by comparing him to creatures who have all the awareness that God gave a tin of peas, because he was a fine blues guitarist who could pick up a new song quicker than I could change chords.

"You're a great musician," I told him when we broke for a few beers and a joint. My compliment was greeted by a blank stare."Do you want to join?"

"The band?"

"No, the fucking Woolwich," Larry muttered. I swear he was growing more like Ray every day.

"It won't be easy," I said."We've only got three weeks to bring you up to speed, and that means a lot of hard work."

"I'll work hard," he said.

"I mean it. No slacking. No telling us you're not well and then sneaking off to the pictures with your bird."

"I haven't got a bird."

Larry uttered a single high-pitched squawk.

"And we don't want no shit bringing to the band."

Stuart's stare grew dimmer, even less comprehending than before.

"Like you don't screw anyone's girlfriend," Larry put in. There was an obvious emphasis in the remark that wasn't lost on Elliot.

"And you don't fuck anyone in the band," Elliot added quietly.

"No armed robbery," Paul said.

"And no nervous breakdowns," I finished."House rules from now on."

Stuart just nodded compliantly.

**************

For the next three weeks we worked to a rigorous schedule of practice, practice, practice, then come back and practice some more. We worked so hard in fact that we became drudgery slaves, clocking in, working like bastards, clocking out again with our eyelids fluttering. I wasn't getting much sleep in the afternoons due to the sheer weight of thought buzzing and wriggling inside my head like a great mass of bees, and at night time I suffered from a strange phantom feedback in my ears.

I didn't see very much of Alison during those three weeks, and when I did see her I was simply too exhausted to speak in anything other than monosyllabic grunts. I came home around eleven o'clock one evening - about two weeks into the brief period which I have come to regard as The Mad Bit - to find that Alison had opened up her very own a travel agency. There were brochures everywhere - scattered on the sofa, piled on the coffee table and spread over the carpet ( where she would have read them with her hand propping up her chin, her legs straight out behind her, eyes flicking back and forth between the Hotel Los Plonkos and the Rover's Return); there was even a couple of them in the magazine rack. God knows how she managed to get them all home. I didn't deliver this much shit in a week.

The tinkle of cups and little bowls told me she was in the kitchen making tea. I tried to sneak off to bed but in a small flat like ours you can't even sneak a fart in the bath.

"Don't go to bed, Jimmy!" she called. I heard that edge of frustration in her voice, a familiar sound I had grown to dread. She came into the room - rushed into the room, wiping her hands on a tea towel."Don't go to bed yet. I haven't seen you today."

"It's after eleven," I said wearily, fishing for sympathy I had little hope of catching."I've got to be up at four."

She glanced at the clock."You can sleep all afternoon."

I sighed and sat down on the sofa. Between my legs I could see a sun-baked woman waving at me from a lilo.

"Don't sit on that. I was reading that one."

I snatched the brochure from under me and dumped it on the coffee table. I could now see that the woman on the lilo was floating dangerously close to a passing speedboat.

"Do you want some tea?"

"No...Yes," I said, rubbing my eyes."No sleep in mine."

"What?"

"Sugar, no sugar."

She went off to make tea. I stared at the television screen but the shapes and figures immediately began to lose definition. I blinked rapidly and shook myself like a wet dog. I knew exactly where my tea would end up if I fell asleep now.

Alison came back with two cups of tea and cleared a space on the sofa."What do you think of Portugal?"

"They've got a good defence but the midfield's gone to pot." It was a classic case of I'd started so I finished. Needless to say it wasn't the answer she was looking for.

"Honestly, Jimmy," she said, and sipped grimly at her tea."Just once, just once I wish you'd-"

"I'm tired, Alison," I said forcefully."You know what I've been doing all evening. And I was-"

"I was up a four," she mimicked."I've been to work as well, Jimmy. Only when I finish work I come home."

I fell back against the sofa, my hands covering my face."Right, Portugal's great, Alison. Book it. We'll go to Portugal."

"Stop being stupid."

"Then what do you want?"

"I want-" She thumped me in the stomach, which was one way of getting my attention, I suppose."I want us to have a nice evening at home for a change. I want us to talk about holidays, Jimmy. I want to us to go for a drink without you dragging half the resident band off stage to join us. I want..."

"Go on," I said, sitting up straight."Say it. I know what you're going to say, so just say it."

She looked away from me and shook her head."I want you to grow up, Jimmy, that's all. I want you to grow up and stop being a dreamer."

Without a word I got up and went into the bedroom. Once there I threw a uniform and a change of clothing into my postbag, collected my acoustic guitar from the spare bedroom and walked out.

*************

I remembered the night that Kat was taken into labour with baby Ray, when Megan was with the band and bombs were things we saw dropping majestically out of aeroplanes in old war films. We were playing at the Railway Inn, and Ray opted to go on stage rather than watch his child being born. I was full of admiration for him, and I was sure that if I was ever faced with such a sacrifice I would go ahead and make it. Because the show must go on, as Larry said that same night.

The show would go on. I had made my choice.

All of this came back to me the night I walked out on Alison. It came back to me in my old room, which still had my heroes on the wall and the nostalgic odour of stale socks in the carpet, while my guitar gently wept.

*************

"Is it permanent?" Larry asked. He was smoking all of a sudden - fags I mean, not just dope. I kept meaning to ask him what it was all about but my mind couldn't hold such trivia for very long. I had a head full of Alison and not much room for anything else.

"I don't know. It feels pretty permanent though."

We were in the drum room, taking a break from rehearsal. We had now entered the phase we had nicknamed Final Push. In two days time we would be on stage at the Shepherds Bush Empire.

"You know, I haven't been with a woman since Megan left me," Larry said. Something in his eyes was reaching out to me. I could plainly see that Larry Anderson was drowning in his own private misery, but how could I save him when I had nothing to cling to myself? "I haven't really got past it."

"Past what?"

"All that shit. Not sleeping, not eating, feeling sick all the time. I keep wondering when I'll feel better.

"Are we ready boys?" Dean asked over the mike. His voice startled us. I looked at Larry but the moment was gone, spooked like a nervous animal. I doubted that we would ever come close to being real friends again.

We went back to work, back to playing the same three songs over and over again. For our fifteen minute set we were going to play Sometimes Down, World Of Good, and a surviving favourite from the earliest days, She's Not To Be Trusted. Once the gig was over I was never going to play any of them again, not even if Sony offered me silly money to record them. I loved Sometimes Down. Everyone loved Sometimes down - it was still one of the most requested tracks at the Thursday Night Northern Blitz with John Mullins ( now moved to Tuesday evenings at the Horse and Trumpet, Bethley) - but if I had to play it or even hear it one more time I would not be able to guarantee the safety of anyone within punching distance.

"All work and no play makes Jimmy a dull boy," Dean said as we were packing up. I just stared at him strangely."Jesus, you look like Steven."

"Stuart," I corrected absently."Dean, what are you talking about?"

"You look tired, Jimmy. Seriously tired."

I nodded morosely."Yeah, that's because I am tired."

"Do you want something to help?"

"Like a bed?"

He laughed and shook his head."I meant something to help keep you going. I can get as much speed as you need."

I smiled faintly at his great wit."Do you take it?"

"All the time. How else would I keep up the dance?"

This time I laughed. Dean still did the weird dance on stage every now and then despite our furious attempts to make him stop."I thought that was genius."

"Genius comes in powdered form these days. What do you say?"

"Ask me again tomorrow. And if I look any worse than I do today, don't take no for an answer."

Renwick called over to Elliot's house on the eve of the show to wish us luck and to make absolutely certain that we knew how to deal with pushy A&R people.

"Be nice and friendly," he said."Nice and friendly's what they like. But tell them to speak to your manager. Is everyone clear on that? Jimmy?

"Speak to our manager," I intoned. I was hearing but not quite hearing. My mind was still so full of Alison. I hadn't seen or spoken to her since I walked out of the flat. I thought she would have called my parents' house just to see how I was getting on but she hadn't. I felt hurt about that, even though I was being equally stubborn by not calling home to see how she was getting on. I did go back to the flat on the third day of our separation. I went to pick up some clothes and Queen Live Killers, Ray's guitar and a few other bits and bobs. It was the middle of the afternoon but I still hoped to find her there. The very least I deserved was to discover that Alison was too distraught over our break up to answer telephone enquiries about nought percent finance deals on new and used Saabs, but she wasn't home and the flat was suspiciously tidy. The thought that she might already be clearing me out and getting on with her life filled me with misery and distress. The impulse to do something uncharacteristically romantic was strong for a time. I considered leaving a single red rose by the mat where she always took off her shoes after coming home, perhaps with a note - Alison, I love you. I miss you. I'm so sorry. Or a couple of airline tickets instead of a rose. She would laugh and cry with happiness and call me the Milk Tray man, and off on holiday we would go, leaving all our troubles behind us. But in the end I took what I had come for and left. She no longer believed in me, and two weeks in Benidorm would hardly change that.

"I'll be there with you," Renwick went on,"But I can't be everywhere at once. So don't do anything silly like sign your lives away. It's happened before, believe me. One moment of rashness could cost you a successful career. And you are going to be successful, lads. We know that, don't we?"

I think he was waiting for us to reply with one of those aggressive group shouts you hear from rugby teams and US Marines, but we just hummed in agreement and nodded. It was all we had left in us for the time being.

I left with Dean that night. We drove to Manchester in the camper, dropped our gear at his parents' house, and then went out to a nightclub. I took some speed for the first time in my life. At least I think it was speed. Dean called it Billy Whizz, and it tasted like crushed aspirin. The effect it had on me was to banish my fatigue and make me think I could drink and dance all night long, which we did until the nightclub closed. After that we walked home and spent the rest of the night watching videos of Only Fools And Horses. We were still wide awake, laughing over classic Trigger moments, when Dean's mother came downstairs just before seven. Over breakfast, Dean told his mother we were too excited about the competition to go to bed. Somehow I think she knew her son better than that.

We left at eight to pick up the others. Mrs Fairweather waved us off from the garden gate. Across the road a curtain was twitching. I wondered if the mystery occupant sensed some kind of occasion in misty morning the air, because I was beginning to.

**************

"Look at that," Dean said, pointing through the windscreen. I could hardly miss the swell of fog ahead of us. It looked as though a great dirty snowbank had rolled off the moors and swallowed up what was left of the M62. We watched the cars in front of us evaporate one by one, bleeding red warnings to those behind. Five seconds later we ourselves were devoured. Through the side window I could see only scrapings of crash barriers showing through thin veils in the fog. Ahead of us there was nothing but a few yards of road weakly illuminated by the van's headlamps, and a rumour of other vehicles fuelled by fleeting glimpses of red and amber.

"First time I've been caught in a fogpour," I mused."Fog's something you usually wake up to. Rain catches you by surprise. And sometimes the sun comes out all of a sudden. Do you know what's great about speed?"

"Mine's worn off, Jimmy."

"So?"

"So I'm no longer immune to all that bollocks you talk when you're whizzing."

I laughed at that."I know, I know, but the best thing about last night was not feeling bad about Alison. I've been feeling like a wet dog ever since we broke up, but last night all that misery just seemed to float out of my body. I still feel good."

"It won't last," Dean said, a note of warning in his voice."You might come down with a bit of a bump. Sometimes you feel like shit for days after."

"But I felt like shit to start with. It's like I was going back that way but decided to spend the night in a nice hotel and spoil myself."

"Drugs are a detour on your way home to Shitville, Jimmy." A smudge of red light appeared ahead of us like a faint beacon of hope. Confirmation of life in this grey void other than ourselves. Grimly, Dean focused on it, determined not to let the other driver out of sight."When I was a kid I used to get off the school bus and go to this record shop just to look at all the rare Beatles and Stones singles mounted on the walls."

"I did that with guitars," I said."I went to this grimy little place under the Dark Arches where an old Status Quo fan made and sold acoustic guitars. I would strum them or just hold them. They were beautiful. Then I'd go home and murder Feeling Groovy on my student Encore."

"I had one of those."

"You've still got one of those, Dean."

We laughed at that. We were still laughing at that when the paramedic felt the back of my neck and asked me if I was in pain. Then abruptly it was just me laughing - or making a sound like laughter - and someone told me to keep still, you've had an accident.

We weren't moving anymore.

"James? Can you open your eyes for me, James?"

Don't call me James, Dean, I thought incoherently. My eyes fluttered open and everything was still foggy.

"James? Come on, James, open your eyes for me, there's a good lad."

I opened my eyes. My mother was looking down at me with professional concern.

"Can you speak to me, James? Can you say your name?"

Alison came and went.

"What day is today, James?"

I opened my eyes.

"Hello, James?"

I paddled feverishly into the shallow end of unconsciousness, hardness beneath me, water all around me.

A nurse. Just a nurse. I could see ( sense?) urgent movement behind her. Little green men and women.

( crash team crash team this one's )

"-in hospital, James."

Frightened, bewildered, I turned around and swam back to the deep end.

************

Doomed rockers Flamboyant Gesture are this week reeling from the news that lead singer Dean Fairweather ( formerly the front man with Jazz-funk bandits Trump The Dumplin') has been critically injured in a motorway pile up near Manchester. The accident happened as two members of the band, singer Fairweather and guitarist Jimmy Conker, were making their way to London for the final of the Sony Music (UK)/ Dixon Battle Of The Bands competition. This latest tragedy comes after FG's former front man Ray Myers was jailed for armed robbery. Vocalist Megan Thomas also quit the band after sustaining serious injuries in an IRA bomb attack.

**********

I cut that article out of the Bandscene section of the local newspaper. Our gigs had been receiving favourable reviews for the past four or five years, and of course we made the gossip column from time to time, such as when we poached Dean and Stuart and after that night Ray sang the Irish song. I keep them all in a little scrapbook, but this article has special significance for three reasons. Firstly, it was the first time in my life that I have ever been referred to as Jimmy Conker. Secondly, that phrase 'doomed' haunted me for the next six months or so. And thirdly, when I first read it I couldn't help smiling to myself. You don't know the half of it, I thought.

*************

My parents came to see me the morning after the crash. By then I had been moved out of intensive care and up to a small ward with a few sick old men and a glum teenager with double leg fractures. I had a broken collarbone, a hairline fracture of the skull, a broken fibula, two cracked ribs, and of course my achey breaky heart. Nobody would tell me what had happened to Dean. All morning I pestered everyone who came within a foot of the bed, nurses, a doctor ( briefly), the woman who pushed the tea trolley, but they all had the same tender smile and the same standard reply: I'll try and find out for you - get some rest now.

Mum sat by my bed and dabbed her eyes with a Kleenex. She had aged about ten years since I last saw her. Dad mostly hovered at the foot of the bed with his hands behind his back. Every now and then he would pick up my chart and pretend he understood the doctor's comments.

"We came over as soon as the police told us what happened," mum said."They let us look in on you but you were asleep."

"When was that?"

"Yesterday teatime."

Teatime was six o'clock, but not on Mondays because Monday was dad's domino night. He went out at seven so tea was at five.

"Mum?"

She gripped my hand tightly."Love?"

"What happened to Dean?"

"Dean who, love?"

I just smiled and said it didn't matter. Maybe they did know and were trying to protect me from further shock, but I'm more inclined to believe mum's version of events. Dean who? was some other mother's son. Her own was all that mattered to her, all that was important.

"I'll try and find out for you," dad said, and he wandered off with his hands behind his back.

Mum smiled pensively."He's upset," she said. I tried to picture my dad crying in the toilets or the car park but the image wouldn't come. My dad was like the best of dads - strong, solid, dependable, hard working. But he was also an unknown quality. My mind went back to that night when Ray had vowed so vehemently to be more to his son than a snap box and a rolled up Daily Mirror trudging up the garden path every twilight. It's a nice thought, but I believe he would have failed in the end despite his good intentions. I think our fathers are meant to retain a certain mystique, and their children should beware of trying too hard to break it. Some things are brighter for their mystery, things like Monday night domino games and where elephants go to die.

Another squeeze from mum's hand roused me from my thoughts."Alison's in the car," she said.

************

You see those old war films where the wounded young officer is visited in hospital by his beautiful sweetheart. She's usually wearing a hat with a veil across her face so that he can't see she's been crying, and he's in bed, propped up on his stiff upper lip. They call each other darling and talk about spending endless summers together. It's all very romantic. I mention it simply because life's never like a film, except for the bombs and the deaths and the other shit bits. But every now and again real life comes close to imitating our perfect fantasies. The first time I kissed Kat, for instance, and on a few occasions with the band. And again when Alison came to see me.

She looked pale and drawn and frightened. She didn't rush across the ward and into my arms, and I didn't call out her name in a weakened, entreating voice. Instead she walked hesitantly over to my bed and sat down on the chair. We smiled tentatively at each other.

"I've brought you some undies," she said after a few moments."And some toothpaste and stuff."

I could see her tearing up inside. It was in her voice, in the fidgety movements of her hands, and then it began to show on her face.

"Did you bring me a hug?"

Her head went up and down and her face scrunched into that stinging, spongy prelude to tears. A single racking sob escaped her before she dumped her head on my chest and wept. I could smell lemons and soap and Radion, and I didn't know whether my heart was mending or breaking all over again. Also, my fucking ribs were killing me.

"I want to come home," I said."Can I come home, Alison?"

Her head moved vigorously up and down against my chest, causing greater sweet agony to my broken ribs.

*************

A young doctor came to see me in the late afternoon. She was about the same age as me, and I couldn't help but dislike her for being middle-class and achieving her ambition. I'd worked just as hard as she had, maybe even harder, and all I had to show for my efforts was a rocky relationship and bags under my eyes. They don't give you certificates for that.

"Your friend is very poorly," she said."He's sustained massive head injuries."

There can be nothing more disconcerting than hearing a doctor use a word like massive. She didn't even bother to fish for a vaguely clinical synonym such as substantial or extensive.

"Will he wake up?"

"It's always possible, but to be realistic, it's very unlikely in this case."

"He's in a coma?"

She nodded.

Coma...coma...coma...I repeated the word over and over again in my mind. Such a cold and empty word, like lost and alone and abandoned.

"He'll be like that all the time, will he?"

She nodded again. It was a silly question. Of course he would be like that all the time. That's why they call it a persistent vegetative state and not a vegetative state with sunny spells and outbreaks of singing.

"Your mother tells me you're in a pop group."

"Rock and roll band," I said, smiling absently. She smiled back at me.

"Wish I'd done something like that."

"Instead of being a doctor?"

She didn't understand where I was coming from. She thought that being in a pop group was something you did on those days when you didn't have a lecture to attend. Well it isn't, I should have said. It's my life, it's my fucking white coat.

The good lady doctor went about her business, leaving me to nap. Later I was interviewed by the police but I couldn't tell them anything. They asked me if Dean was driving too fast or too close to the vehicle in front, and if he'd been drinking the previous night, but again I kept my mouth shut. So maybe he was going too fast and playing the dangerous game of tailgating, and maybe he'd consumed a lot of alcohol and a fair dollop of amphetamines without much time to sleep it off, so what? I don't mean that to sound irresponsible, kids. We know drugs are bad for you, okay, but shit happens, as the American car sticker says. Perhaps fate might have taken us down an empty carriageway if Dean had been sober and straight, but he wasn't. And anyway, if fate gave a shit it wouldn't have dropped all that fog on the M62. There were over thirty people injured in that pile-up ( it made the national news) and you can't tell me that all of them had it coming. So, what I mean is, you don't tell your mother, your girlfriend or the bobbies any more than they need to know.

Only a fortnight after the crash I was sent home in a wheelchair ( I went most of the way in an ambulance, I should add). Alison took a week off work to help settle me in at home. Until I got the hang of managing with only one arm and one leg, she did a lot of things for me that a boy will usually only let his mother attend to.

For two months I was fussed over and pampered by friends and relatives, district nurses, colleagues from work ( not forgetting the Post Office welfare people, who were keen to know when I would be fit enough for light duties) and a succession of casual acquaintances from the local music scene. Paul was the most frequent visitor. He came every night after work, always with a local paper and a bar of chocolate, and practically moved in at the weekends. Alison was good about his visits. No - she was saintly in her patience and indulgence. The crash had been one of those odd blessings in disguise as far as our relationship was concerned. We were together an awful lot during my recovery, and we spent much of the time just talking and re-evaluating. I don't think many couples could have gone through such a long period of virtual confinement without falling out or becoming sick of the sight of each other, but our normal routines left us so little time to spend together that we were never anything but grateful.

We played Monopoly for hours on end and fell in love all over again. That's what comes back to me now in any case - laughing, squabbling over who was going to be the Car, letting her win sometimes, drinking wine and playing Jam records, talking about old times, making plans to go on holiday, catching her cheating and punishing her with tickles, and gazing into her eyes across a crowded game board and seeing all the love I felt for her shining back at me. Corny stuff, I know, but tell us that.

************

One evening in April I invited the other members of the band over for a few cans and a conflab. I was all healed up now, at least physically. I still had dreams about Dean which would leave me feeling guilty and depressed. In one of them we were drifting across a calm, colourless ocean on a raft, the only survivors of a shipwreck, when out of the grey mist came a hulking great liner flying the skull and crossbones. An unseen hand on the liner threw down a rubber ring attached to a guitar lead. Dean caught the ring and threaded it over his upper body.

"Bollocks," Jimmy he said pleasantly."Bollocks." And with that he was winched up the liner's slimy black hull, leaving me alone on the raft to read the name TITANIC as the ship sailed away.

I didn't know what any of that meant, if it meant anything at all. It was probably just my mind sifting through draws of guilt and anxiety, turning things over and putting them back with the used batteries and stray clothes pegs. I didn't dream about the crash itself. I still remembered nothing about that. I know that sounds strange, but I don't have a single recollection past the point where Dean and I started laughing over that comment I made about his guitar. I think the god of small prey pulled me out just in time to avoid the messy bit, then dropped me back again when the paramedics arrived. I hope It did the same for Dean.

Paul and Elliot came over that night but Larry never showed.

"I left a message on his answering machine," I said."He could have phoned back at least."

"He was acting a bit strange last time I saw him," Elliot said.

"Strange like how?"

"Just vague, not really interested in what I was saying."

"When was this?"

Elliot shrugged."A few weeks ago maybe."

We popped some tins. Alison was at the swimming baths with Kat so it was just us crazy guys and the Boomtown Rats.

I told them my news just as soon as the first beer was on its way down, that way we would have plenty of time to talk about how they felt. I didn't want to spring it on them as they were going home and risk leaving any ill-feeling hanging between us. I'd learned something about suddenness in the last few months.

"I want to rest the band again," I said."I'm thinking of doing something else."

"Something else?" Paul sounded fretful."Like what?"

"I don't know. Maybe a solo project, or just work on a few songs. All I know at the moment is that I want to try something new."

"But..." Paul stared at me with flustered, blinking eyes."But..."

"Don't get me wrong," I interrupted."I love Flamboyant Gesture, and I don't ever want to wind it up, but there's a lot at stake here."

"Such as?"

"Such as me and Alison."

"But-" Paul blustered out, then quickly shut his mouth. He had absolutely no authority in the area of relationships and knew it only too well.

"If I go back on the road right now it could ruin things for us. We're doing alright at the moment. More than alright. And like I said, I really want to try something different."

Just then the phone rang. I thought it might be Larry ringing to explain why he couldn't make it but it turned out to be Stuart ringing to explain why he couldn't make it. I listened to what he had to say and wished him all the best.

"That was Stuart," I said."He's left the band."

Elliot nodded as if it was something he was expecting. Paul made a sound of frustration and fell back against the couch.

"I don't believe it," he moaned."It's just one thing after the other."

We looked at each other for a few seconds and then burst into laughter.

***********

For the next few months I was a solo artist. I was sufficiently well-known in the area to bill myself as Jimmy Connor Unplugged, and with only an acoustic guitar and a repertoire of classics, I entertained pub quiz crowds the length and breadth of town. Alison came with me most nights, and I would always do Brown Eyed Girl just for her. And the last song of the night, a special arrangement of Heroes, was always for Dean Fairweather.

Some other songs I sang: That's Entertainment. Everything I own. Rock and Roll ( I Gave You The Best Years Of My Life). Distant Sun. Streets Of London. Wait In Vain.

Something for everyone, but then that's cabaret, old chum.

Paul was nearly always in the audience. Without the band he was at a loose end and turned to Alison and me to tie it up for him. I would look at him from the stage and see a child who had been separated from his parents in a busy shopping precinct. After the show the three of us would get hot fish and chips and eat them from the wrapping as we walked home. I tried to give him as much attention as I could without neglecting Alison, but the truth is that without the band we had nothing in common any more; I'd long since outgrown those intense conversations we used to have about Queen albums and which girl our age we'd most like to tit-up.

Then one night Alison brought a girl called Helen to my show. She was tall and birdy with a disapproving face, painfully shy and prone to spill things. I didn't understand at first but when she and Paul began a tentative conversation about computers I looked at Alison and grinned.

That same night - this was early August time, a couple of weeks before Alison and me went to Greece - Elliot came along with his new girlfriend, a French student called Clare who said very little and smiled not at all. I hadn't seen him for a couple of months and hardly recognised him. He'd done a Bon Jovi and cut his hair short.

"Fuck me," I said."Tell me she hasn't punctured your drums as well."

"Love's one thing, Jimmy," he said."Drums is another."

All in all it was a good summer. Good times, great oldies.

***********

In September I put the word about. Flamboyant Gesture were going back on the road.

A reporter from Bandscene came to interview us at Elliot's place. I tried to expand the interview to take in the future of the band but he didn't seem to be writing those bits down. He wanted to talk about Dean and Ray and Megan and whether or not we thought we were cursed.

"How old are you?" Larry said sharply. He was over at the far end of the room, puffing on a cigarette and pacing up and down like an angry little steam engine. Larry wasn't looking too good these days. He'd lost a lot of weight since I last saw him; lean had turned to skinny, and there was a hollow, distrustful expression in his eyes. I'd surreptitiously checked his arms for needle marks but I couldn't see any. Stranger still were the rumours I'd been hearing about him. A girl he worked with told me that he threw a wobbly some months back and punched out one of the company directors. Needless to say he was fired. I asked what the wobbly had been about but she didn't seem to know. Nobody seemed to know. Larry just flew off the handle over something. And there was the stool thing, which was almost too weird to believe. Four people had reported seeing Larry marching through the centre of town with a pine stool under his arm. Nothing unusual or worrying about that, except all of them claimed to have seen him on different days of the same week. They were quite adamant about that.

"Nineteen," the reporter said, swivelling around to face Larry.

"Then you know fuck all," Larry said."Fuck all about music, fuck all about anything."

The reporter turned back to me and smiled uncertainly."So who's the new singer?"

"We don't know yet," I said, keeping one eye on Larry."We're on the look out for a lead guitarist too, so put that down will you?"

He put that down, and for the next three weeks we were kept busy interviewing and auditioning singers and guitar players, none of whom set me on fire the way Dean Fairweather had. Still, we had a choice to make.

"What about that Ken bloke?" Paul suggested."He had a good ear."

"Good ear, shit fingers," Larry commented. He looked up and smiled at our amusement. He was okay that night. He went through patches where he was his old self but they were dispersing like oil on water. Maybe if his music had suffered at the same time as his personality was disintegrating I would have done something about it. But I was back on track, back to the single-minded pursuit of everything I believed was missing from my life.

We finally decided on twenty year old Ian McCloud as our new lead guitar player. A quiet, family man, Ian was just the sort of stable influence I was looking for. Personality mattered as much as ability, and Ian had bags of ability but not enough personality to drag the band up or down. I liked him because he looked upon the band as a long-term means of supporting his three children - all born when Ian was in his teens, which is why everyone called him Pop.

The chosen singer was a glamorous, blue-eyed former miner called Tim Piggins. If there is such a thing as God's gift to women, Tim was it. A couple of years earlier there would surely have been combustive rivalry between Tim and Larry but Larry continued to shrink into himself faster than a haemorrhoid rubbed with Anusol.

When the word got out that Tim had joined the band a curious change occurred in our audiences. Suddenly there were large groups of older females in attendance, not to mention lone boys who would gaze at Tim with soulful longing. Then I discovered that Tim used to take his clothes off in a popular male dance group, which explained a lot. It was with some regret that I fired him. We were a serious music band. I couldn't have gangs of hooligan mothers yelling 'Gerrem off!' and waving five pound notes at the stage.

We went into the New Year with myself back on lead vocals. The money that Renwick promised for studio time never materialised. Then the telephone conversations dried up, and I considered ourselves free artists again.

There was no party on New Year's eve, Instead we played a concert at the Duke, where I sang Brown Eyed Girl for Alison and a new song Bend In The River ( derived from those synthesised instrumental mood pieces I played for Elliot), and dedicated it to all ex-members of the band. We ended with my own arrangement of Heroes, just for Dean.

After the show we packed everything into a hired van and arranged to meet at Elliot's house for a few quiet drinks. Not a party, I emphasise, because Clare had moved in now and Clare was French, which meant that we had to drink wine and admire the antiques all night.

Everything packed away and loaded, I went back inside to look for Larry. I thought I saw him disappearing through the side exit, but when I managed to push my way through the revellers and out into the car park, he was nowhere in sight. I walked around for a few minutes, feeling vaguely disturbed, until I stood on a puddle of thin ice which cracked beneath my foot. Looking down, I saw a fractured reflection of the moon.

I went back inside. If that was Larry I saw disappearing through the crowd, it was the last time I ever saw him.

SEVEN

Musically speaking, we were about to enter a phase I came to regard as the wilderness years. I see this as being coincidental to what happened to Larry rather than because of it. Larry's playing, while being consistent from the band's very first rehearsal, was hardly our defining sound. In fact I don't think we managed to maintain a defining sound throughout the ten years we were a band, largely because of the trouble we had just maintaining a regular line-up. I would say that Ray's guitar playing defined us for a period, and Dean's vocals for a year or so after that, but the rest of the time we were never quite comfortable, never quite there. The sound wouldn't begin to even out until Cole and Warren Pepper joined the band, but in the two years leading up to their arrival we found and lost more people than we had in the previous six years, beginning with Larry.

************

Paul and his girlfriend split up in the middle of January. I think it was just a Christmas thing in any case, two lonely people being lonely together, as Barry Manilow might have put it. I didn't say as much to Paul when he came over to tell me.

"One of those things, Jimmy," he said as he wiped side-one of Blood On The Tracks on the sleeve of his jumper and put it on the stereo."You know how it is."

"It's the best of times, it's the worst of times," I said, and he nodded soberly.

"I don't think I'm ready for her level of commitment in any case."

"No, probably not."

"Maybe when she sees that - when she's worked her problems out - we can give it another go."

Paul needed the break up with Helen almost as much as he needed Helen, because apart from widening his own horizons, it also put him on an equal footing with everyone else who had ever had a relationship. I felt proud of him in some respects but at the same time I also felt a twinge of responsibility for my part in the charade. Paul's great love affair was in reality no more than a blind date that went on for three weeks longer than it was meant to. I know they didn't have sex because Helen told Alison all about it. They tried one night when Paul's mum was out at bingo, but Paul broke into a rash and couldn't get an erection. And when I say he broke into a rash I don't mean figuratively. Apparently he really did break into a nervous rash. Great blotches like deep red slap marks appeared over his face, neck, shoulders, arms, chest - in fact the blood rushed everywhere except where it was supposed to go.

So far he hadn't talked about it ( so far he had even managed to avoid giving me a specific explanation for their break up) and I wasn't about to bring it up, if you'll pardon the pun. So, Paul, your ex-girlfriend was telling my girlfriend that you couldn't raise the flag...It's just not on. And anyway, the subject is taboo with me. I've got this theory that if I start to encourage open debate about impotence I'm bound to fall victim to it, because the more you think about it the more worried you become, and the more worried you become the less likely you are to get an erection. You then find yourself in the ironic position whereby the fear of impotence is the root cause of your impotence, and you can't become potent again until you loose the anxiety, but the anxiety won't go because you're impotent: Catch 22. So it's best not to think about it too much.

Regarding Paul, I took the view that bursting his bubble would not be good for his self-esteem right now. The fantasy was not one he was perpetuating simply to impress me and the others, it was actually doing something for his confidence. He was revelling in the public misery of his relationship going bust - which if good for nothing else, it's how great blues songs get written.

We fell silent as Dylan laid his heart bare. Alison was ironing in the kitchen, and when there came a knock at the door I made a token gesture to save her the bother of answering it.

"Shall I get it?"

"I've got it," came Alison's huffy reply."You just put your feet up. Not as though..."

Her voice tailed away. I winked at Paul and lifted my feet grandly onto the foot stool that didn't match any of our other furniture.

"Women are like dogs, Paul," I began, but then Alison came in the room and I immediately shut up and sat up.

"Someone to see you," she said archly, and gave me the playful raised eyebrows.

Ray, I thought wildly. Ray's home.

But it was Megan who stepped out from behind the door with a little wave.

"Hey, Megan!" Me and Paul said together. Then I said,"Come in," and Paul told her to sit down.

"Pleased to see me then?" she said. Her smile was as radiant as ever. Not even the scar on her face could diminish that. I remembered that night she sang If You've Ever had A Dream and knocked the wind out of my sails. For a moment both painful and glorious I ached for the old days.

Megan sat down in the chair that Paul had vacated for her. He stood by the fire, excited, discomposed, blissful as a puppy. Alison got a bottle of wine out of the cellar ( okay, out of the little cupboard where we kept the buckets and the Mr Muscles), and for half an hour or so we all chatted about what was going on in our lives. Paul was telling her all about Helen when his mother called and asked if he would come home because there had been a power cut and she couldn't find the candles.

"She can find the fucking telephone alright," he said in a chuttery little voice. This was in the hallway, as he was pulling his snow boots on."Fuck me, if it isn't one thing it's another...what are you laughing at?"

"Nothing," I said."Just smiling at something. I'll fix a date up with Megan. We'll all go out together, have a laugh."

He looked up at me, blinking madly, and wet his lips."What do you mean by a date?"

"I mean a bunch of mates going out on the piss."

"Oh, right."

I couldn't tell for certain whether he was relieved or disappointed. Relieved I expect. If birdy Helen had given him the prickly heat I daredn't imagine what a date with Megan would do to him.

After nipping back into the living room several times, like an actor milking his ovation, Paul eventually left. Megan stared at the door, smiling with absent fondness.

"I think he's gone for good," I said.

Megan's smile faltered."He's not the only one."

"Come again?"

"It's Larry - he's gone."

I shook my head, confused."Gone? Gone where?"

"Just gone, Jimmy. Larry's disappeared."

************

Larry had taken out a personal loan not long after Ray was sent to prison. It wasn't a particularly big loan ( nothing a doctor might call a massive loan ), just a couple of grand to top up the cash he'd been saving towards a new car. I knew all this of course, because I had tried unsuccessfully to convince him that what he really needed was a van. All the fellas were driving vans these days, I argued, but it didn't work and Larry bought the Toyota.

"He used the house as security," Megan explained as she drove us over to Larry's house in her dad's Land Rover. I was glancing speculatively into the back, idly wandering how much of our gear would fit into this thing."Then when he stopped making payments on the loan, those letters began arriving at my mum's place. The house is still in both our names, see. We never bothered with an agreement after we split. I just took what I could carry and left."

"Bit like that was it?"

She nodded miserably."You don't know the half of it, Jimmy."

We got to the house and Megan stopped the car.

"I came to see him the day before yesterday. I was going to tell him to sort his life out and stop dragging me down with him."

"You didn't know he'd lost his job then?"

"I heard the rumours, same as everyone else, but we hadn't talked in a long time. I just wanted the letters to stop. I didn't want to pay for a loan I hadn't even taken out."

We got out of the car. Megan fished for the keys in the pocket of her jeans."A man from a debt collection agency keeps calling at my mum's house. I don't know how they found me."

"Royal Mail redirection service," I said."Postmen know everything about you. They'll tell too, as long as the price is right."

She looked at me strangely, ready to laugh."You're kidding."

"Really? Give me two or three days, Megan, and I can tell you where you work, how much you get paid, who you owe money to, where your children go to school, who your dentist is, your doctor, your solicitor; I'll have your credit card number, your telephone number and the numbers of all your friends and family; I'll get your previous and forwarding addresses, and give me a bit longer and I can even get the names of your pets - so long as they aren't fish or terrapins or something like that."

"Pets?"

"When vets send out cards reminding owners that a pet's vaccination is due they tend to address the card to the dog. You know, like Fido Smith or Spot Jones. They think it's cute."

Megan was stunned."And you can tell all this from letters?"

"I can get most of that information from the envelopes, Megan. Officialdom is very indiscreet."

"That is the creepiest thing I've ever heard."

"It's a great job for stalkers. But hey, at least we whistle."

Megan used her key to let us inside.

"Didn't Larry change the locks after you left?"

"Larry didn't even change his underpants after I left. Look at this would you..."

The hall was littered with mail - catalogues and other junk mail, official letters in brown and white envelopes, three copies of the monthly keyboard magazine Larry subscribed to, free samples of shampoo and disposable razors, local election bumph from all the major parties, a veritable jigsaw puzzle waiting to be solved. Some of the mail was opened but the rest, probably over a month's worth, had been kicked under the radiator or left where it fell.

"When was the last time you came over here?" Megan asked me.

I had to think hard about that one."Over three years," I said."It was that night Alison and me came over for dinner."

"Pizza," she said, smiling absently."That's a long time."

"Events just gathered me up in their tumble, Megan."

She nodded simply."I know. It happened to all of us. Now come and see this."

We went into the living room, and what I saw there shocked and saddened me profoundly. It wasn't the mess, the piles of dirty clothes, the empty food tins and takeaway containers, the sweet wrappers and mounds of candlewax melted onto dinner plates, it was the den that Larry had constructed out of furniture. It dominated one corner of the room, at first glance nothing more than a random piling of chairs and table tops with bits of carpet slung over it, but after a few moments it became apparent that a certain amount of care and attention had gone into the construction. When my eyes finally made sense out of the jumbled arrangement of furniture ( and it seemed to happen that way, like looking at an optical illusion or one of those Magic Eye pictures) I was struck by a sense of tragedy and sorrow that I hadn't even felt for Dean.

"He's been living in there," Megan said.

I went over to Larry's little den and knelt down by the entrance. The door was a bath towel, the roof a whole door. Years later in a dream I would pull back the towel and find Larry's skeleton propped up on a pillow with a yellowing NME clutched in its fingers. I think this dream occurred to me because what I really did find was the last trace of Larry Anderson. A sleeping bag neatly rolled into a sausage, an empty baked bean tin with a plastic fork poking out of the top, a torch, and a personal stereo. The tape inside the stereo was Phoenix by Flamboyant Gesture. I was strangely moved by the certainty that he felt safe in this place, that this crazy assembly was Larry's sanctuary from the bewildered chaos outside. This place and the music.

*************

I took Megan for a drink to help me get over the shock. First though I looked through some of the letters in the hall and discovered that Larry was in debt for more than just the car loan. There were other loans, some from the bank, others from credit companies, a repossession notice, and a nasty letter from his former employers demanding that Larry return five hundred pounds which had been mistakenly paid to him after his dismissal. Mental arithmetic has never been my strong point, but after looking through those letters a figure approaching ten thousand pounds didn't seem too far wrong.

Why seemed a good question to begin with.

"I can understand how he might have got himself in debt," I said."But how could he live that way? Why was he living like a squatter in his own home?"

Megan studied me for a moment or two, a vodka and tonic poised at her lips. She set it down without drinking any."Did Larry ever say anything to you about electricity?"

"Electricity?"

"Anything at all. Something you might have dismissed but-"

"Yeah, wait a minute," I said. I was almost remembering something but it wouldn't quite come back to me, something which occurred not long after the bomb blast.

"Larry had a thing about electricity," Megan went on."He was always claiming that the electricity supply was..." She looked at me levelly and shrugged."He said it was contaminated."

"Jesus," I whispered."I remember now. I went to see him just after the bomb - when you were still in hospital - and he said there was a problem with the electrics. He was waiting for the electrician."

"Larry was always waiting for the electrician." Megan smiled sadly."It got as though they wouldn't come out in the end, not even for the call-out fee. There never was a problem, you see, only Larry insisted there was."

"I knew he was going through a bad patch," I said quietly."I never knew..."

Megan nodded."Larry's been ill for a long time, Jimmy. He was ill before the bomb, ill before I left him. I just didn't realise how ill he was."

"Nor me," I said hastily.

"It's alright," Megan said softly."I lived with him. If anyone should have seen this coming it was me."

That's right, I thought. I just worked with him.

"So what do you want to do now?"

"I want to find him," she said."He's out there somewhere, Jimmy, and I'm frightened for him."

************

The following day we went to see Larry's parents, some people he was friendly with at the printing works, and we also spoke to some of his neighbours, none of whom could shed any further light on the mystery. The picture they painted of Larry was the one I had come to know over the past year or more, that of a man slowly drifting away from everything and everyone which tied him to this town. If he spoke about going away to anyone it was only in the vaguest of terms.

The last people we spoke to that day were the police. They listened sympathetically to our story and our concerns for Larry's well-being, and then patiently explained that Larry Anderson was a grown man who was perfectly within his rights to run away if that's what he chose to do, and because he wasn't wanted in connection with any crime, they were unlikely to launch a manhunt in the near future. Having said that, our concerns for his safety and state of mind had been noted, and the photograph and details we gave them would be promptly circulated. The sergeant we spoke to then gave us a list of useful contacts, among them the Missing Persons' Bureau, The Salvation Army and a number of similar agencies in London. And that was that. We were basically told that unless we were prepared to find him ourselves, Larry Anderson would remain lost.

************

I helped Megan write letters and make the necessary telephone calls to the contacts the police had provided, but my enthusiasm for the task waned when deejay John Mullins suggested that Flamboyant Gesture and a number of other local bands play a benefit concert for Dean. I told John that I would gladly get involved so long as I wasn't expected to play Bob Geldof and hijack the world's conscience.

"I'll get the venue," John told me."I'll even handle the publicity for you. All I want you to do is get the musicians organised."

I'm a fine one to be charging that task to, I thought. Mine are dropping like flies.

I set about arranging a set for the show. About the same time the police telephoned me to say that Larry's car had been found abandoned in a car park in Leeds. Megan and I went straight away; I had a band to see in any case.

The car park turned out to be a residents' parking area on a housing estate just outside the city centre. The car had been removed by the time we arrived, but we spent an hour or so knocking on doors and asking people if they had seen the man who abandoned the car. What car? most of them asked. That car, the one not there.

"It's hopeless," Megan said as we walked into town. All of a sudden she looked distraught. I patted her clumsily on the back.

"We know he was in Leeds. That's more than we knew yesterday."

"He could have been here as long ago as New Year's day. He's gone, Jimmy."

We visited the bus terminal and the railway station, where we showed Larry's photograph to everyone wearing a hat or pushing a broom. Some of the people we spoke to were sympathetic enough to wish us luck and say they hoped our friend was soon found, but others merely glanced at the photograph and shook their heads before returning to their duties. This was a busy place, a busy town. And they'd seen it all before.

In desperation we asked an official at the railway station if we could trawl through all the footage taken from the surveillance cameras since New Year's day. Maybe there was a chance that Larry had been photographed boarding a train or purchasing a ticket, and from there we could work out where he had travelled to. But of course our request was refused. Someone like Tim Robbins and Jamie Lee Curtis starring in a film about two ordinary people who get mixed up in the mystery surrounding their missing friend would have been allowed to look at the video footage shot at Leeds Central, but plops like us have to join the police force or get a court order; or at the very least hope for a cool official who winks as he says I'm just going to take a leak, mind you two crazy kids don't go playing with that video machine in my prolonged absence. But if life was like a film we'd all live happily ever after, even those of us who get blown up or go to jail or sink into irreversible comas. And the missing, they'd all come home.

Megan was right. Larry Anderson was gone. Goodbye, stranger.

*************

In February we got a new singer. Her name was Angie Bailey, or Angie Baby as she predictably came to be known. She was a lovely girl but the most outrageous slut imaginable, and after only a month fronting the band - a month in which she slept with Elliot, John Mullins, John's assistant David Green, John's wife Sally, and a dozen others whose embarrassment I shall spare ( don't even think about it, because I didn't...for very long) - I fired her. She cried and promised to behave herself, and I almost gave in, but then she stuffed her hand down my trousers and I was forced to get tough. If you see what I mean. I know what you're thinking: sexist pig is what you're thinking. How could I let Larry carry on behaving the way he did for so long and then fire some poor girl for doing no worse? Simple - I'd learned the lesson, that's how. One or two indiscretions could be forgiven or overlooked, but sixteen in a month is enough to test any man's patience.

A new singer was found. His name was Christopher Walken, like the film star, but I made him use the stage name Walker to avoid any confusion. At roughly the same time I replaced Larry with a guitar player, after first consulting with Ian (I couldn't bring myself to call him Pop ) to ascertain whether or not he fancied working with another lead guitarist. He didn't mind, and so for a period of some months we were a three guitar outfit, which added an interesting new dimension to our sound. The new man's name was Luke Devine. He was just twenty and studying to be a disappointment to his wealthy parents, who despite disapproving of their son's activities generously funded a demo tape, which was ironically titled Crisis? What Another Crisis?

In hindsight we shouldn't have made this tape. It's not something I wish to stand as a reminder of what the band was all about, but whenever I get depressed about it I always think of David Bowie singing The Laughing Gnome, and that cheers me up no end. Ha-ha-ha, hee-hee-hee, I go.

**************

I was collecting cash from the cashpoint machine in town one day in April when I felt something slim and hard poke me in the small of the back, and a menacing voice whispered,"This is a hold up," into my ear. I yelped and spun round, fists flying, and almost knocked Ray's head off. It was so good to see him I almost cried.

"Hey, Jimmy," he said.

"Hey, Ray." I stepped forward, nearly hugged him, but then grinned and punched him on the shoulder instead."Are you out?"

"Escaped."

"Bullshit."

"Weekend release," he said.

"Really? That's good of them."

He nodded keenly."Oh yeah, it's great. It's like being on the fucking oil rigs."

"Right," I said, feeling like a prick."You still have to go back though, eh?"

"Ah, no worries, Jimmy. I'll be out for good soon enough. Not like our kid. He'll be away for a long time."

I didn't know what to say to that. Sorry wasn't quite right, so I just smiled stupidly.

"He's had it coming to him. When he was a kid we called him batman, because he never went out without robbing."

"You've still got it, Ray."

"I know. Got most of it from Frank Carson. Come on, Jimmy, I'm dying for a drink."

We went to a pub and talked about Larry and the band, Dean and the crash, Alison and me, some other stuff. Ray seemed content to listen, which he did with a placid smile that rarely left his face. He looked different somehow, changed. He looked more mature, or maybe it was both of us getting older.

"I'm sorry I never came to see you after the trial," I said."I should have done."

"I didn't send for you."

"I know, but I could have written or something."

Ray just smiled and shook his head."It doesn't matter now. That's all behind me. I'm in a soft nick, getting ready to face the big bad world and anything it can throw at me. Kat's still my girl. Everything's groovy, Jimmy."

"Really?"

"Really."

"What about...you know."

"My mental problems?" He laughed but there was a scar on him every bit as visible as Megan's."I'm doing alright in that department. I've been seeing a therapist for two years. Taught him everything I know."

"Stop kidding, Ray."

"Kidding's the best medicine, Jimmy. A spoonful of kidding every day. I mean it.

"So you're really okay?"

"I had a lot of problems but we've worked them out now."

"You'll be wanting a job when you come out."

Ray sat back and knitted his hands behind his head."Are you offering?"

"I've still got your guitar..."

He didn't hesitate for a moment - didn't hesitate to turn me down flat, that is.

"It's your guitar now, Jimmy."

I told him about the benefit gig for Dean, planned for September 1st at the Pack Horse theatre in town."Will you come as my guests, you and Kat? I'll get you a box."

"To stand on?"

"To sit in, moron."

"Sure," he laughed."We'll come, Jimmy."

"Good. Excellent," I said."I'll bring your guitar along...you know, just in case you want to take it home with you."

***********

Luke left the band shortly before the benefit concert in September. I'm not sure why he went. He just called me up one day and said he was off. So I said okay, see you later, and replaced him the very next day with Phil Waterhouse. I chose Phil because he was mature ( at twenty nine he was the oldest member of the band by a year), and because he drove a Renault van.

*************

In early August Ray came out of prison for good. I didn't visit him until a few days before Dean's benefit gig, largely because I was uncertain about how I would feel seeing him and Kat together. It didn't bother me though, except for the odd twinge of jealousy and regret which came and went like the occasional aches I still suffered in my leg.

I invited them to the gig, and they accepted. When I went to see Megan the same afternoon it was to invite her along also, but she got it into her head that I had come about Larry.

"There's been no word from the police," she told me gloomily.

"That's probably good news," I said. We were sitting in the kitchen of her parents' house, drinking ice cold chocolate milk shakes. It was hot outside but Megan didn't like to sit in the sun because it made her scar look angry.

"How do you mean?"

"I mean..."

"Oh right," she said, catching my drift."But I'm prepared for that, Jimmy. I've faced enough reality in my time not to be afraid of it anymore. To tell you the truth I think Larry is dead. I think he parked his car in Leeds and took a train to the coast, and then threw himself off a cliff or something."

I shook my head."Why not drive to the coast instead of taking the train?"

"To lay a false trail."

"But why lay a false trail if he intended to kill himself? He must have known that his body would turn up sooner or later. You can't hide your own body. If Larry was going to kill himself he would have parked up somewhere quiet and stuck a pipe up the exhaust."

"That's what you'd do, Jimmy. Larry was - is - very mixed up inside."

I gave it a few moments thought but I still wasn't convinced."I think he's still out there somewhere, maybe wandering through small towns in the American midwest."

"That's romantic bollocks, Jimmy."

"That's what songwriters tend to come up with, Megan. But I believe it. I think that Larry left his car in Leeds and took a train or bus to Hull or Dover. If you really want to find Larry, that's where you should start looking."

She chewed her lip as she mulled it over."Maybe," she said at last."But he didn't take his passport with him. The police asked us that, remember?"

"Yeah, but that doesn't prove anything. Maybe when he left he had no idea where he was going, which could explain the gap between New Year's day and when the car was found."

She was nodding now, catching my optimism."And then he decides to take a train and...and then what?"

"Jump on the back of a lorry or something. It isn't that difficult to sneak out of the country." I told her about Sean Gorman, a school friend of mine who hid in the back of a lorry delivering cigarettes to Holland.

"But if Larry's done something like that there won't be a trace of him anywhere."

"Don't give up," I said."Someone will remember seeing him, especially if he was wearing one of his sillier hats. He must have hitched a ride or bought a cup of tea in a service station somewhere."

Megan gazed at me helplessly."But where, Jimmy?"

"Somewhere," I said.

**************

The benefit concert exceeded my expectations from both a commercial and an emotional standpoint. Three hundred people each paid ten pounds to see the event, which is recorded for posterity in a Bandscene Special Edition, and more than four minutes of Calender News and Look North television footage. Admittedly Glen Tilbrook accounts for about three minutes of the latter.

Seven bands played that night, including ourselves and special guest star Glen Tilbrook from Squeeze. Glen generously agreed to be the penultimate act, and even more generously invited yours truly to duet with him for an acoustic version of Labelled With Love. So there you go. Other people might say there's been so much trauma in my life that it must be hard to forget the good times, but then those people must never been in my band or dueted with the guy who used to be in Squeeze. You see, you never forget a great chorus do you? Never, no matter how bad the rest of the verses are.

Ray and Megan joined us on stage for our final encore. We sang She's Not To Be Trusted, California Dreaming, and finally Heroes. It was just like old times again, if just for one day.

*************

I took the cheque to Dean's mother in Manchester a few weeks after the concert. I didn't stay very long, just long enough to drink my tea and close the book. She asked me if I wanted to see Dean, but I was honest enough to tell her that I wanted to remember him as he had been on stage. She smiled and said she understood. When I left I couldn't help thinking that she too was in a state of coma.

*************

Phil Waterhouse left the band shortly before Christmas. We weren't gigging much and rehearsing not at all, and he said there was an atmosphere of stagnation that smelled like pond water. Whatever the fuck that means. I was fond enough of Phil but I didn't miss him. He was like so many of the faces that came and went in that wilderness period - just names and faces behind guitars and microphones. I guess some people impact on your life while others merely pass through you like ghosts.

EIGHT

I woke up one dark, snow-muffled morning in February with a vague recollection of terror. The numbers on my digital alarm clock glowed like coals. I lay there watching the colon between the hours and minutes throb with silent urgency. The numbers changed, and I felt that strange uneasiness you sometimes get when you think too deeply about time and how it shifts and clicks and nibbles like the unlocated sounds you think you hear in a very old house.

I had dreamed of the crash again, only the terror I remembered on waking was more than a residue of the dream. It was a memory. My mind had blanked out the last terrible images of what happened that foggy day on the M62, but that singular flash of panic and terror was still living inside me, blinking constantly like the red colon on my clock. Like my heart.

The numbers changed to 03:59, and I began to count in time with the pulsing colon, getting ready for the moment when the buzzer would sound and Alison would stir and grumble in her sleep. The longer I counted the more frightened I became, because as crazy as it might sound I had somehow convinced myself that when the numbers changed to 04:00, I would die. The house would finally collapse and all ticking and beating and pulsing would, for me, cease. I was almost twenty nine years old and chasing a dream with all the breathless, exhilarating frustration of a small boy racing after a football that's being blown away by a gale.

I crushed the alarm before it went off but the numbers changed anyway. They always do.

*********

I asked Ray to join the band. I think it was a natural reaction to the indistinct sense of anxiety and dissatisfaction I was experiencing at the time. Going back to something that was familiar, something which had worked, seemed paradoxically like a positive step forward. Or maybe I was just being sad and sentimental. Whatever it was, I needed to find the starting point all over again.

"I don't think that's something you'll find outside the band," Ray told me. We were in his front room, listening to an Elvis Costello compilation. Kat was ironing in the kitchen; I wondered what Ray did when Kat's friends came round for a girly chat. Me, I usually just turned up the television and sulked.

"I don't understand."

"Okay," he said."If your car won't work it doesn't always need a new part. Maybe one of the existing parts needs cleaning up or something."

"I haven't got a car."

"But you get what I'm driving at?"

I nodded gloomily."You're saying I'm the problem."

"And the solution. You're just going through a phase, Jimmy. A musical downer. There are times when I just don't know what I want to listen to. I can't bare to hear a single record in my collection. And then, like magic, I have to send Kat away so that I can play everything I've got over and over again."

I looked at him and laughed, partly with amazement and admiration, partly with relief."You really did teach that shrink everything you know."

He studied me for a few moments, smiling secretively as if he was plotting a surprise for me."Come upstairs," he said at last."I think it's time I showed you this."

We went up to the spare room. I noticed that the stairway, the landing and the spare bedroom had all been decorated since I was last up here. Decorating the flat was something I avoided until Alison's little reminders prickled me into action, reminders such as pulling off huge strips of wallpaper or writing obscene messages on the painted walls. Even then I tended to paint everything white with a hint of indifference. Ray's work, by comparison, was art, but then he was a decorator by profession. If I had a lot of personal letters to deliver I would no doubt perform the task with much flair and finesse.

There was now a computer and a desk in the place where Ray used to keep his guitars and amps. I thought of all the times I'd seen lovely old buildings bulldozed and replaced by soulless office blocks.

"Gave them all away," Ray said with a rueful smile."One more guitar hero bites the dust, Jimmy, like six million before me and six million next year. Have you ever looked into those guitar shops in town and wondered what the stories are behind all the battered Fenders and Squires?"

"Guitar graveyard," I said."That's what I always think of."

"And a boulevard of broken dreams." He clapped me on the shoulder as if to break the morbid atmosphere."That's not what I wanted to show you. Sit down over there for a second."

I sat down behind the computer while Ray switched it on and loaded up a programme. I thought we were going to play Doom or something, but instead a list of files appeared on the screen. Ray called one up.

"I got into computers in prison. While my cellmate was learning how to clone mobile phones and credit cards I was taking classes. He's still inside, by the way."

There was a title on the screen:

INSIDE OUT

by

Ray Myers

"What is it?"

"It's my first novel, Jimmy. I've almost finished it."

I looked at his face, anticipating a punchline or a joke's- on-you smirk, but he simply smiled in that placid way I had come to expect from him."Like a novel?"

"It is a novel."

"Like a real novel?"

"As real as they get at this stage."

"You've written..." I stared at the screen and shook my head with wonder. Ray pressed the cursor button; words scrolled up before my eyes, thousands of words - certainly more than three minutes worth."Jesus Christ, Ray. This is fucking brilliant."

"You haven't read it yet."

"I know, but it's still fucking brilliant."

He tapped me on the shoulder. When I looked up he was grinning."You're right though, Jimmy - it's fucking brilliant."

"What's it about?" I asked, turning back to the screen. I wasn't sure what I was looking at because I hadn't yet read any of the sentences stretching across the computer screen, but I was in awe of the reality of it all. A novel. I mean, a fucking novel!

"It's about a man who has a nervous breakdown and turns to armed robbery."

"Did you do much research?"

"I asked around," he said, digging his knuckles into the back of my head."But don't say anything yet."

"Why?" I pointed at the screen."If I had done this I'd want everyone to know."

"It's just so much data, Jimmy, so many words. It won't be a book until somebody can walk into a shop and buy it."

"That's bollocks," I said."The achievement here is writing it, not publishing it."

"Maybe," he said."I'd still like to see it in Waterstones though. And that's one of the reasons why I won't join the band again. I've got other dreams to chase now."

"And?"

"And because you're still shite, Jimmy."

We went downstairs to listen to some more music. Kat came into the room and asked if we wanted coffee.

"Have you told him yet?" she said, and Ray narrowed his eyes and shook his head.

"Told me about what?" I asked when Kat had gone.

"About August the eleventh."

"What about it?"

"I'm getting married." He stood up and offered me his hand to shake."Will you be my best man, Jimmy?"

**********

Of all the music I was exposed to during my childhood and teen years, two songs, and the imagery associated with them, stand out in particular. One of them is I Don't Like Mondays by the Boomtown Rats. For a long time after - and even now, to a certain extent - the story behind that song effected me profoundly. The disturbing lyrics, those dramatic piano chords which chop suddenly to that haunting and fatalistic little melody at the end, created its own dark and intense horror movie in my mind, but it was the video which caused me to lie awake until the early hours of the morning, grimly enacting the violent downfall of all those who had wronged me. Similarly Pink Floyd's masterpiece of schoolroom oppression Another Brick In The Wall practically incited my friends and I to classroom rebellion. One teacher of mine, a former army captain who regularly employed a long plank of wood he nicknamed The Equaliser on the quivering backsides of any boy or girl who dared to so much as giggle in his lessons, banned the record from the lunchtime disco on the grounds that it was bolshy and subversive. Thus the record became an anthem for downtrodden schoolchildren everywhere, but particularly to those who congregated in our main hall every Monday and Friday lunchtime. I remember him storming into the hall when an acne infested John Mullins defied the ban and dared to play the record at full blast. He burst in through the swing doors, his face crusted with scarlet rage, The Equaliser brandished like a sword, and succeeded in personifying everything that Pink Floyd were singing about. He even looked like that overblown demon schoolmaster from the video.

"Hey, teacher!" we all sang at him."Leave them kids alone!"

Corny, I know, but tell us that. It was the very first time in my life that I smelled the scent of victory in my nostrils, the very first time I stuck it to 'em. Though perhaps I ought to point out that I didn't feel much in the way of injustice prior to hearing Pink Floyd's record. I was largely well-behaved and had managed to avoid the many forms of physical punishment that were employed in my schools, that is unless you count the time I was ordered into a corner for drawing a knob in my maths book, which hurt my dignity more than anything. Paul got the cane once, curiously enough, when he was wrongly identified as one of a gang of boys who had been causing trouble on the school bus. He cried for something like two terms. But Another Brick In The Wall made me stop and think about what was going on around me, and while I was moderate enough to concede that some kids needed a whack every now and again, I wasn't one of them, and nor should I ever be treated that way. That song filled me with enough bravado to stand up for what I believed in. It inspired me scream Hey, teacher, leave them kids alone! But not loud enough to be heard above the record of course. That would have been suicide.

Mark Neary came to the band after splitting with his own group Way Out Left. Mark was a painfully shy young man with a lot of personal problems weighing down on his shoulders. I didn't know what they were, but I could tell by the distant anxiety in his eyes that it wasn't something he could be tickled out of. I had my reservations but his unassuming personality and genial sense of humour finally won me over.

Mark had been playing with us for almost six months before I heard his first original song. It was called Under The Stairs, and it moved me and frightened me in a way that no piece of music had done since I Don't Like Mondays. The song was a twisted lullaby to a little boy from the grandfather who abused him nightly. Mark was a poor singer, yet it was this wavering, discordant tightness in his voice that gave the song its most harrowing quality. If I closed my eyes I could hear the little boy straining to be heard through Mark's adult voice, smothered and struggling like someone trying to scream with a hand clamped over his mouth.

We previewed the song at a pub in York a few nights before Ray's wedding. Ian had added an eerie, wailing guitar lead which he played slightly behind time with Mark's stricken vocal. The effect was devastating. Even the audience of half-cut students were stunned. One girl started to cry and left in a hurry with two concerned friends in tow.

After the show, Ian told us that he would leave the band rather than play that song again.

"It's a beautiful song," he said."But I've got kids, and I just can't bare to hear it."

Mark left that night. We never played the song again.

***********

Being best man at Ray's wedding was the single most nerve-wracking performance of my entire life. I've played a duet with Glen Tilbrook, raised the roof off St George's Hall, supported Uncle Nobby and Snappy the Crocodile at a six year old girl's birthday party, but nothing prepared me for being a best man. I don't know why it's supposed to be an honour. I'd say it's about the worst thing you can inflict on a friend - after shagging his wife and taking his best Stratocaster, that is.

The suits Ray had bought didn't help much. Ray's jacket hung from his shoulders as naturally as it hung from the hanger it came on, but mine was tight around the middle and irritated the back of my neck.

"You should have asked him to alter it for you. That's why he had that little tape measure around his neck. What did you think it was, a fucking python with anorexia?"

"It felt alright in the shop," I grumbled. Which wasn't strictly true. It had felt tight in the shop but I didn't want to admit that I was putting on weight, not least to myself. So I told the man with the anorexic python that it felt comfortable. He must have known the truth though. Trying to fool your tailor is like trying to fool your doctor.

When we came out of the shop ( this was in Leeds; the shop was lurking up one of the city centre's many seedy little alleys, where nobody but cloaked assassins and people buying wedding suits dare to tread ) we bumped into Annie. She was dressed as a nurse, which puzzled me until she explained that she was a nurse. I was staggered. It was only a few months ago that she was a hippy, and now she was a fully qualified nurse, with chunky calves and everything. But of course it was years since she left the band and not months. I tried to think of a similarly astounding development in my own life but there hadn't been any. I was still with the band, still pushing letters through letterboxes.

Ray invited Annie to the wedding but she didn't come. Megan came though, accompanied by a research chemist she was apparently about to get engaged to. They looked prosperous and happy, all set to buy a detached house in the subs and a white Jeep for Megan to go shopping and do the school run in. She was now working in an unqualified capacity for one of those giant chemical companies that kill a lot of rabbits and occasioanlly wipe out large parts of India, but they were sponsoring her degree so none of that mattered these days.

I don't want to talk about my speech, or that joke with the piece of toast that nobody laughed at, but on a graph showing the most catastrophic bombings in performance history, my speech would come only slightly below Ray's Irish song. When it was all over, and John Mullins kicked the disco in, I shrugged off my jacket and relaxed - or almost fainted with relief, if you prefer.

"That's a four hundred quid suit," Ray noted as my jacket slipped off the back of the chair.

Elliot was astonished."Four hundred quid? Christ, I've bought cars for less."

"It's a profitable business, bank robbery," Ray said with a wink. He was joking of course. He was flush because he and Kat had only recently settled on a compensation claim after a protracted legal dispute. They were richer to the tune of fifty thousand pounds. Considering what they had been through I didn't think they were rich at all, but I understood that sometimes you have to accept things, whether that's a price on your baby's head or the end of a chapter. I think that by accepting the deal Ray and Kat were closing one door and opening another.

Later in the afternoon, when everyone had stuffed themselves with chicken legs and crusty slabs of pork pie, and the silly songs you only ever hear at weddings and beach parties on the Costa Del Sol were playing, Ray asked me if I would help him bring some records from John's van. Once outside he drew me against a wall and told me not to bother. He took a rolled up cigarette from his Golden Virginia tin; the only bad habit he'd picked up in prison, he reckoned.

"I just needed a time-out," he said.

I nodded."So, how's it feel to be a married man?"

"That," he said, eyeing me pointedly over the flame from a match,"is the most boring and predictable question you can ask a man on his wedding day, Jimmy." He lit the cigarette and smiled crookedly."Got a question for you now."

"What?"

"You won't be expecting it. Not like your question."

"Come on then."

"Are you over Kat yet?"

Neither of us said anything for what seemed like an eternity - or what to me seemed like an eternity; I dare say that to Ray, who wasn't in fear of his life, it felt like a matter of seconds. In that space of time I saw my whole life turning upside down and landing in a jumbled heap like the contents of a chest of drawers ransacked by a burglar. It would take forever to put everything back in its correct place, and even then there was bound to be something missing. I was deeply ashamed of what I had done, fearful of what Ray would do to me now, but the worst feeling of all was knowing that I would lose Alison. It wasn't simply the prospect of spending a long stretch in single mans' prison, where I would no doubt share a cell with Paul and our Queen records, it was purely the thought of being without her that so panicked and frightened me.

Ray's face was a picture of cool amusement, as if the guilty secret he had just uncovered was no more shocking than a pile of tit mags hidden under my bed.

"You don't have to answer. I thought you might want to explain yourself, that's all."

"Wher-ow," I stammered.

"How did I know?" Ray drew on the cigarette, his eyes never leaving mine."Ray always knows, Jimmy. Ray always knows."

"Did Kat tell you?" I asked, finding my voice - or most of it in any case; what was there sounded wimpy and shaken.

"She didn't need to. And If I ever feel the need to ask her I hope to God she denies it. I don't want it wedged between us for the rest of our lives. Does Alison know?"

I shook my head.

"She ever ask?"

"Not specifically. She once asked if I'd ever screwed someone else."

"And you lied to her, right?"

"Mmm, yeah, suppose so."

Ray nodded sagely."There are just three important questions a woman can ask her man, Jimmy, but those three little questions test his devotion, his loyalty and his fundamental respect for her. Basically, the very foundations a relationship is based on. Question one: Do you love me? Question two: Have you ever had an affair? Question three: You won't come in my mouth will you?"

I smiled, sickly and uncertain. Suddenly I wondered if the unaffected routine was exactly that - a routine designed to gain my confidence and lull me into a false sense of security. To what end though I didn't know. Maybe it would make Ray feel better, make his revenge all the more sweet.

"Best not to put yourself in a situation where you feel you have to lie to her - except with the last one, naturally. But none of us are saints, Jimmy, least of all me." He pinched the end of the cigarette and put it back in the tin; another habit he'd picked up in prison, where tobacco is valuable currency, I imagine."I've put Kat through a lot these past few years. Too much. Any other woman would have left me by now, but then Kat's not just any woman. She's my wife."

The reception hall doors swung open, spilling a drunken chorus of Hi-Ho Silver Lining into the warm afternoon air. Kat was looking at us with motherly suspicion.

"Don't get that dress dirty," Ray said."I might need to dig it out again in a couple of years."

"Der," Kat went."I'm holding it up aren't I?"

"What do you want?"

"Nothing. Just checking up on you."

"Being nosy," he said, and Kat wrinkled her nose at him."I've got a nosy Kat for a wife, Jimmy."

I smiled indulgently, a smile I had to prise up like an old floorboard. It wasn't the first time the three of us had been alone since Kat broke off our affair, but on those occasions I wasn't aware that Ray knew about us, and that made a whole world of difference to my composure.

"Don't be too long," Kat said."John's found the record."

She blew Ray a kiss and went back inside.

"You Are So Beautiful," Ray explained."Joe Cocker. Do you know it?"

"Not all the way through," I said, and Ray laughed.

"I'm not angry with you, Jimmy. Kat was lonely. She needed someone to talk to, someone to worry about her. I was too busy robbing banks and going out of my mind. In a way I'm glad you were there for her. I mean, I'm glad it was you and not another tosser like me."

"I'm sorry," I said."I really am sorry, Ray."

"Don't be Jimmy. I've been shagging Alison for yonks."

"She any good?"

"She swallows."

We looked at each other, smiling crooked, blokish smiles.

"You know why I told you, don't you?" Ray said as we headed back inside. He held the door open. Hi-Ho Silver Lining was fading into Come On Eileen.

"Because I needed to admit my guilt," I said."You knew that, same as you knew I was never going to tell Alison." I squeezed passed and gave him a friendly dig in the stomach."See, you're not the only shrink in town."

************

The conversation that Alison and I should have had after Ray and Kat's wedding didn't happen until Elliot married Clare in December.

"You'll be thirty next year," she said.

We were in bed, me on my back, she curled up against me with her hand laying over my heart. If we were cats we would have been purring.

"So?"

"Do you think you'll still be able to get it up?"

I laughed uncomfortably - not at the thought of being past it sexually, because that was preposterous, but at the dismaying prospect of being too old to rock and roll. Okay, Rod Stewart and Elton John and the Rolling Stones are all getting on to say the least, but they haven't recently been promoted as bright new talents. They've all served their apprenticeships and are now deservedly employed in rock and roll cabaret. But me, I must be the only has-been who never even was, if you see what I'm getting at. These were not new fears. I'd been quietly fretting over this for some time now. Ever since Dean sank into a coma, in fact, and the band entered its wilderness period. There was a very real danger that in the next couple of years Flamboyant Gesture would take the dreaded downslide into the Northern working mens' club scene. We would be forced to play Hi-Ho Silver Lining every single night and announce the raffle prizes in between numbers. We would no longer be a band even, instead we would fall under that all encompassing banner of The Turn.

"Have you thought about what you're going to do?"

"A party you mean?"

Alison dug her nails into my chest."Not a party, moron. I meant with your life."

"I don't know. I'm not sure that being thirty's going to change anything."

I felt her relax against me - a slightly disappointed relax, it has to be said.

"It's just that you've been with the band for eight years."

"That's longer than you and me have been together."

Tactfully she ignored this last remark."And you've never had any real success. You don't make any money. And let's face it, Jimmy, you're not as popular as you used to be. These days you're lucky if a handful of people turn up to see you play."

"This isn't fair."

"I'm being honest. I believe in you, Jimmy. I've always believed in you, haven't I?"

"Suppose."

"But maybe I don't believe in you in the same way as I did back when we first started going out together. It makes me sad to think of all the time and hard work you've put into the band. You could have been a doctor or a lawyer or anything you wanted to be."

"I already am," I said."I'm a guitarist in a rock and roll band. That's everything I want to be, Alison."

"But it's not. You're unhappy. Disillusioned. Don't you ever think it's time to give it up and do something else?"

"We're being honest, right?"

"Right."

"Never. I'll sing Agadoo and call the bingo numbers before I sell my guitars."

She giggled and thumped my chest."Jimmy!"

"Next year," I said."If things don't change for the better I'll go to medical school and write a blockbuster in my spare time."

**********

You'll notice there are no initials after my name, and nor do I keep bumping into my old mate Jilly Cooper at polo matches. That's not to say that things got better, because they didn't. Things got worse, but in the most spectacular fashion.

We ended this year in the dark, but waiting just around the corner were Cole and Warren Pepper. Let there be light, I said, but exploding suns I never expected.

NINE

Elliot spent most of January on a management training course for the property company that Clare was a junior partner in. It was the first job he'd had since leaving sixth form college with his A-level certificates rolled up into drumsticks. My first reaction to the news was one of amusement. I tried to visualise Elliot in a grey suit with his name on a little gold badge on the lapel, but that amusement quickly vanished when I found to my horror that I could quite easily picture Elliot as an assistant manager in an office where everyone conversed using that baffling administrator's lexicon which included phrases such as stock invoice control and daily input figures. Clare had been steering him that way ever since they met, cutting his hair, forcing him to shave everyday, dressing him like a well-meaning inner-city vicar, and now she had finally revealed her dastardly plan. It saddened me. It saddened us both in fact. He was in a cheerless mood when I took him for a drink the night before he left for Swindon.

"I keep having this dream where I come back from the course and Clare has sold my drum kit."

I was shocked."Do you think she might? I could keep them at my place if you feel it's safer." That was a plan I hadn't considered to its logical conclusion - namely me sitting in the street with Elliot's drum kit and all my clothes in black dustbin liners scattered around me.

"No, it was just a dream."

"Nightmare."

He nodded glumly."This whole thing's a nightmare, Jimmy."

"Then tell her you don't want to go. Stand up for yourself."

"It's not that easy," he said, shuffling uncomfortably in his new grey flannels."I sort of think I'm doing the right thing. You know, like in the back of my mind."

I thought back to the conversation Alison and I had on the night of Elliot's wedding. Elliot and Clare must have been through the same woods before us, only I would have bet all my Queen albums ( except for Live Killers ) on Elliot coming up with the same arguments as those which I had used against Alison. In his own quiet, modest way, I thought, he was every bit as determined and single-minded as I was. Only now it seemed that I was wrong. He was weakening, and I was looking at one more reliable part of my life turning upside down before my eyes.

"You could pretend to be sick," I suggested."Eat an apple and a carrot, then drink some coffee and spit it all into the sink."

"Tried it."

"And?"

"I was sick. I hate carrots."

*************

I thought about taking the Jimmy Connor Unplugged show back on the road but I couldn't quite raise the enthusiasm. Alison's remark about our popularity being on the wane had burrowed into me like a worm. It was something I had been aware of but I was living with the hope that nobody else had noticed how small and indifferent the crowds were becoming, or how the gigs were thinning out. Another know-it-all was bound to say something sooner or later, and so I armed myself with a clipping from Bandscene lamenting about how the town's live music culture was experiencing a general bad hair day. I would show this to anyone who dared to suggest that Flamboyant Gesture were losing it, citing economic and social reasons behind it all. What I failed to reveal was the quote directly beneath where my scissors had cut:

"...and spent rockers Flamboyant Gesture still scratching pitifully in the dust like a crippled insect."

I wish I could attribute that scurrilous remark to the kid who came to interview us shortly before Dean joined the band, the one Larry lost his temper with, but he was now the paper's leading crime reporter. It didn't matter though - the only people who read Bandscene were musicians searching for their names in tiny black letters.

I could have done something useful during the time that Elliot was away - and by useful I mean useful in the sense that Alison would use the word, useful as in decorating the flat - but instead I spent most evenings looking at the current crop of young bands. Most of them failed to impress me, which delighted me, but one or two of them were punchy and exciting. An outfit called Glen's Sister were particularly good, not least because they lined up with three guitar players much like spent rockers Flamboyant Gesture.

A thought struck me as I watched them play that night at the Duke. It made me sigh with that same pensive resignation you feel when you renew your passport and compare your latest photograph with the one you had taken ten years before. The thought was this: Eight years ago, when I stuck that card between the fishing trip notice and the telephone number of a local prostitute, the members of Glen's Sister were probably playing Tag in the playground or chasing each other across the back fields on their mountain bikes. And then I had to think that maybe one of them brought his first date to a Flamboyant Gesture gig, and maybe another one lost his virginity at the same time as Phoenix was belting out of his Goodmans unit, and I didn't feel so blue.

During the show I noticed a small group of young lads looking at me from time to time. They were dressed in those expensive sports clothes from Kappa and Berghaus that only Liverpudlian car thieves seem to be able to afford.

I felt uneasy, threatened even, and decided to leave before the trouble kicked off. I didn't know what I had done to upset them, but judging by the look of them it was probably nothing personal. One of them was particularly interested in me. He was small and stocky with a scowling expression. He seemed to be the ring leader, the one who was about to walk up to me and ask what the fuck I thought I was looking at.

The stocky one did follow me, but when he called my name I stopped, puzzled, and turned around.

"It is Jimmy Connor, right?" he said.

I nodded cautiously. I was still afraid that he might say Well take this, Jimmy Connor, and drop the nut on me, just to personalise it a bit.

"I thought it was you," he went on. He smiled, almost a sneer, and I saw a lad who would have your car radio out while you were still singing along with the end of Hey Jude."Will you listen to this?" He dug in the pocket of his jacket and handed me a tape. The title was Songs By Cole Pepper.

"Is that you?"

He gave me that sneering smile again."I don't go round giving my fucking record collection away, Jimmy. Course it's me. There's a phone number on the back. Give me a ring when you've listened to it."

"It might be shit," I said, and he laughed.

"You decide."

I did. I took the tape home and played it with the headphones on. Side one, track one:

Whirling tape noise...mysterious clunk...Fuck off, Warren...someone in the background singing New York New York and giggling...Warren, fuck right...whirling tape noise...

That's where I switched the tape off. If I had then pressed the eject button instead of fast forward I honestly don't know what would have happened, same as I don't know what would have become of the Beatles if that moron from Decca hadn't said they were crap. Most certainly we would have gone down a different path, perhaps continuing to change faces in the way we had over the last two years, just a bunch of interchangeable journeymen musicians getting older in the spotlight.

I let the tape run for no more than three seconds, and when I pressed the play button again, it took me no longer to figure out that Cole Pepper was either a genius or a complete fraud.

A minor, C, D, A minor...but of course it's not what you do it's the way that you do it. The introduction to the first song on the tape, played on a scratchy acoustic guitar with a twanging G-string, jolted me out of my chair. Startled, Alison stood up at the same time, dropping the novel she had been engrossed in. I saw her lips move and pulled the headphones away from my ears.

"What?"

"What?"

"Nothing, sit down," I said, and we both sat down.

Let me put this into perspective before I go any further. I don't, as a rule, wet my pants whenever I hear a great song for the first time. Not on the radio in any case. But I didn't hear this song on the radio, polished and produced and snipped down to fit neatly in between the deejay's banal drivel - I heard the song raw, in all its honest, naked glory.

Furthermore I was probably the first person from outside Cole Pepper's circle of friends and fellow twoccers to listen to it. And the first person with the opportunity to act on what he was hearing, much like the guy from Decca who got it so famously wrong.

I played the whole tape, then rewound to the beginning and played it all again. By the third listen-through I was singing along to most of the songs, humming the tune where I couldn't quite follow the words. The next day I took the tape to work and played it continuously on my Walkman. It was already sounding like a great album. Or I should say that it would play like a great album once the songs were finished, because more than half of them were little more than choruses with a few meaningless lyrics thrown in amongst the la-las and da-das. I was reminded of the story Paul McCartney tells about how he came up with the melody for Yesterday in his sleep. While he dressed and made breakfast, this incredible - almost too incredible to be original - melody going round and round in his head like a hamster on a wheel, he inserted the lyrics scrambled eggs, oh how I love to eat scrambled eggs, simply because they fit the tune and stopped it dropping back into his subconscious.

In the afternoon, too excited to contemplate my usual two hour nap on the sofa, I dialled the number on the back of the tape. My call was answered by a surly young voice.

"Yeah?"

"Is that Cole Pepper?"

"Is it fuck. Why, do you want him?"

"Well, yeah, if he's there."

"Our Kid!" the cretin on the other end of the line yelled, almost splitting my eardrums."Who is it?"

"Tell him it's Jimmy Connor."

"Right."

I heard Cole in the background asking who was on the phone.

"It's your mate - Jimmy Conker," the young cretin said, and the pair of them sniggered.

Then Cole finally came to the phone."Alright, Jimmy?"

"Alright," I said. All of a sudden I wasn't sure if I wanted to go through with this (whatever this was leading to). The possibility of a beautiful friendship was not something I looked for when choosing which musicians to work with, but not liking a person was one thing, disliking a person was something else entirely. And distrusting them...that was always a reason to back off. There was something about Cole Pepper that made me cautious, perhaps no more than his sneering smile, but I was on my guard all the same. I got the feeling he was taking the piss, if you want the truth, and not just with the Jimmy Conker thing.

"Did you listen to the tape?"

"Yeah."

"And?"

And I think you're fucking Mozart, is what I would have said had Cole been a nice, amiable sort of guy instead of a car stereo thief with an attitude problem.

"I think it's good. I like it. There's some good tunes on there."

At that point the young cretin started singing into the receiver. I recognised the song as Blasted, from Cole's tape. The cretin had a good voice, truth be told.

"Fuck off, Warren!"

So that was Warren...

"Jimmy!" Warren called, sounding as though he had retreated to a safer distance."Our kid wants to be a pop star!"

"Don't bother about him," Cole said."I'll shut him up before you come round."

Cole gave me the address and said he would see me in half an hour or so, then hung up. The conversation left me feeling dizzy and vaguely troubled, the way you feel after you finally get to close the door on a clever salesman, when for a while you can't be too sure that you didn't buy something.

Cole lived on a rundown council estate known affectionately as Death Valley at the sorting office. Three quarters of the estate residents were unemployed but they all had satellite television and Vaxhall Cavaliers. And don't accuse me of negative stereotyping because I'm just the plop who delivers their giros and Sky magazines on the same day. You might be able to fool the social security people but you'll never fool your postman.

There was a wrecked car parked outside Cole's house. A little boy of about seven was jumping up and down on the roof. When he saw me approach the gate he jumped down and legged a Ben Shaw's lemonade bottle at me. I thought how lucky I was not to be in uniform.

Cole answered the door and showed me in. The house was nice inside, clean but cluttered.

"Mam's out so we can jam a bit if you like."

We went upstairs to Cole's bedroom. Warren was sprawled on the bed, kicking a flap of loose wallpaper with a toe that poked through a stiff-looking sock. He stood up when we came in, his long, wolfish face breaking into a sneer of derision.

"Way up, Jimmy!" he said, and came at me as if he wanted a fight.

"This is our kid," Cole said."He's going to do some singing."

"I want to be a pop star, Jimmy," Warren said, dancing from foot to foot in front of me, his jabbing fists stopping only inches from my stomach."Waddaya reckon?"

I reckoned he looked like a pop star, one of the latest breed of scruffy frontmen from the British guitar band revival. He was thin and lanky with greasy black hair and hollow cheekbones. His eyes were dull brown and strangely lacking in awareness. I suppose he was good looking if you like your men half dead from heroin abuse.

Cole and me sat down on chairs while Warren paced up and down between us.

"I can play a melody part to Big Changes if you think you can manage the rhythm."

I finished tuning my guitar and went straight into the sombre introduction to Big Changes, one of the songs on Cole's tape. Cole grinned and nodded enthusiastically.

"Alright, Jimmy! You make it swing, boy!"

And then, his hands stuffed in his front pockets, Warren jumped in with the vocal, effortlessly belting it out at the top of his lungs. Cretin or not, the boy had a voice in him.

"Fuck off, Warren!"

I stopped playing. Warren tensed in front of his brother, feigned a ducking attack, and mooched away to begin his pacing routine all over again.

"You know when to come in, fuck's sake."

"Fuck's sake," Warren echoed in a nagging falsetto."You know when to come in fuck's sake."

"Fucking baby."

"Yeah, fucking baby, right," Warren huffed."Give us a bottle and wipe my arse."

That tickled me for some reason. Cole was also amused in a smirky way. This was all new to me, being an only child, but I'd often longed for the kind of casual abuse that was so obviously a part of the Pepper brothers' lives.

"Can we go again, Jimmy?"

"Sure," I said, and we went again.

We played two more numbers from the tape before Warren grew bored and listless and lay down on his bed.

"Can you sing, Jimmy?"

"I can sing but I'm no singer."

"No matter. I've had enough for today in any case."

We went downstairs and had a beer from the fridge. I was itching to find out just why Cole had invited me over here, and why he had given me the tape in the first place.

"What do you think of the songs then, Jimmy? Being honest and everything..."

"Did you rip them off?"

Cole looked insulted."No."

"Then I think you'll make a lot of money one day."

"Fuck the money," he said."I want to know what you think of the songs."

"They're brilliant, Cole. You don't need me to tell you that."

"But I need you to help me work on them, develop them along a bit. I can't write music, see, just snatches of songs. You can write music."

"The songs are already written."

"I couldn't get up on stage and perform them like that. But you can." He sat back and grinned at me from behind his Heinneken can."I've been watching Flamboyant Gesture for about six years now, ever since I started going into pubs. See that band at the Duke the other night, Glen's Sister? They sound a bit like your lot, Jimmy."

"Do you reckon?"

"And who do you think that laddo upstairs copied his act from?"

"Sid Vicious, Jim Morrison..." And then I nodded slowly as the realisation struck me. I felt strangely moved."And Dean Fairweather."

"We used to sneak Warren in just to see him do that fucking dance."

I thought of Dean doing the crazy things he did on stage, how alive and vital he was. That made me smile and always will. Even now as his body marinates in that sterilised hospital environment, chunks of his brain scooped out like so much Korean food, I can still only see him singing and dancing.

"So what exactly do you want me to do?" I asked.

Cole looked at me as if I was stupid."I want you to join our band."

"Your band?" I laughed incredulously."You want me to join your band?"

"Are you as deaf as that fucking drummer of yours? That's what I said, Jimmy - I'm forming a band, and I want you to be in it."

I was silent for a minute or so. I wasn't considering Cole's offer, only trying to come up with the best way of turning him down. He seemed to be something of a Flamboyant Gesture fan - I heard that in his music - but he knew nothing about the band that he hadn't read in Bandscene. If he did he would know that asking me to leave was a non starter.

Unless he was arrogant enough to believe that I would be so impressed with him I would just up and join his band.

"We've got a history," I explained."It's bigger than me, bigger than anyone who's ever been in the band."

"Then it can live without you."

I shook my head."No, you don't understand. What I'm saying is that I can't walk out. There's a force at work there that won't let me go. I play in the band because I love it, but that doesn't necessarily mean I have a choice."

"You see," Cole laughed,"I can't fucking talk like that, Jimmy. I can't write songs about anything except shagging and being on the dole."

"That's more than enough to make you famous."

"I don't want to be famous. Warren wants to be famous. I just want my songs on the radio and on MTV. You're like me, you know."

"You reckon?"

"Definitely. That's why we should work together."

"I'll help you clean the songs up but I can't join your band. I'm committed. Besides, you've got enough about you to start on your own."

"And how long do you think we'd last with Bette fucking Davis on vocals?" Cole sneered and took a swig from the beer can."We wouldn't last two minutes, same as most of the bands these days. Not like your lot. You've been through enough shit to open a sewage plant. And you've been right in the middle of it all the way through."

"Not just me. Elliot and Paul have been there from the beginning."

"But you're the anchor, Jimmy."

************

I didn't take Cole up on his offer. In a dream I had that same night, Cole was famous and earning zillions. His face was everywhere, on television, on roadside billboards advertising his latest album, on officially licenced products ranging from the usual tee-shirts to the more unusual Cole Pepper aftershave, on badges worn on school blazers, on packs of collectable stickers, on maths books and history projects; he was even in the moon, like a vision of Christ. His music was played in supermarkets and elevators, in pubs and clubs, in stadiums and theatres the world over. Cole Pepper was a phenomenon. And in the dream a guy from the NME who dressed like Cole and scowled like Cole came knocking on my door looking to interview the infamous tit who chose to get up at four o'clock in the morning and deliver mail for the rest of his life rather than work with Cole Pepper.

The dream was weird and intense and left me feeling soupy and vaguely distraught, but it was just a dream; it did nothing to convince me that I had made any decision other than the correct one.

When I returned home from work later in the day I found Cole Pepper sitting by the front door in a surplus East German army coat and a hat he must have bought from a Polish immigrant arriving in New York. I had a weird premonition that a similar picture, taken in black and white against the backdrop of a scrap metal yard or freight centre, would grace the cover of Cole's first album. Or maybe it was my imagination kicking in, because suddenly I was excited and inspired.

"Your neighbours said you'd be back about this time," Cole said. He didn't stand up to greet me, just lifted his face and gave me that sneering smile."They all came out to ask what I was doing here."

"It's the neighbourhood watch."

"They thought I was doing the place over."

"Do you want to come in?" I asked, but Cole merely shook his head."Then do you mind if I go in?"

"Minute," he said absently."I've been thinking about what you were saying. It makes sense not to split Flamboyant Gesture right now. The band's pretty well established. So I've come up with a compromise."

"Which is?"

"To team up at your end." Cole stood up and stuck his hands in his coat pockets."Makes sense, don't you think?"

"Do you want to join the band? Is that what you're saying?"

"Mmm, sounds like it, Jimmy."

"Right, right," I said. I wanted time to think but I sensed a strange urgency over the whole situation. To put it lyrically, this train would never stop here again, and there was only time for me to use my instincts and not my reasoning."Okay then, you're in."

He nodded simply."Good. Warren'll be made up."

I didn't connect with that last bit until Cole was walking away and my key was in the front door lock.

"Wait!" I called, jogging up the path. Cole stopped and half turned."What did you say about Warren?"

"I said he'd be made up, as in pleased."

"But..."

"We come as a package," Cole interrupted."That singer of yours is ready salted, Jimmy. He's got no flavour. I don't even know his fucking name."

I didn't even know his fucking name, not instantly, not without having to fumble for it, but that didn't mean I was happy to get shut of him.

"Give us a bell if you change your mind," Cole said.

"That's okay. Warren's a good singer, good frontman." As I spoke something sank to the pit of my stomach and gurgled there like indigestible food."I'll get rid of the other guy."

**********

Christopher Walken, aka Christopher Walker, had been with the band for almost two years. In any other walk of life that would be long enough for me to consider him a friend, and therefore beyond serious criticism and serious hurt, but in the microcosmic structure of the band he was just another part to be replaced at the next service. It was nothing personal. Christopher was a victim of technology like so many a working man. In this case the new chip was Warren Pepper, unknown, untested, but part of a package set to revolutionise the machine. I had to give him a chance. I simply couldn't face another setback, another disappointment, and another eight years in the wilderness waiting around for the next saviour.

***********

The latest incarnation came together a few nights after Elliot returned from Swindon. The atmosphere throughout those first couple of months of rehearsal was tense and suspicious and occasionally hostile. Warren was loud and stroppy and sought attention in the only way he knew, which was to piss people off.

Paul was a natural target for Warren's merciless teasing. Thin, weak, bespectacled, Paul had been bully fodder all his life, but within the band he had found sanctuary from the pot-shots which were still being fired at him in adulthood. At work there were a few young lads who teased him and enjoyed moronic practical jokes at his expense, such as putting glue on his chair and writing I'm A Sad Wanker on his briefcase in fluorescent marker pen, and at home he was subject to nightly invasions by local kids who pelted his windows with eggs and screamed abuse through the letterbox, but the band had always been his retreat from that. Sure we ribbed him a lot, same as we ribbed Elliot and everyone else in the band, myself included, but there was never any malice involved. It was all in jest, taking the piss in an affectionate way, as any bunch of blokes will do. But with Warren it was different. It wasn't enough for Warren to uncover Paul's weak points, he then took savage delight in nipping the raw nerves and rubbing salt into exposed wounds, like a sadistic child jabbing at an injured animal with a pointed stick. I knew he was going too far but I rarely intervened. On the few occasions that I did Warren either stormed out of the house, accusing everyone of being against him, or he rounded on me and exposed a few tender spots of my own. There were times when I felt like clocking him, as I know Ray would have done, but I would catch that glint of drug fever in his eyes and always took the more discreet option.

The casual drug taking was something that frankly shocked me. Both the Peppers were heavily into coke and speed, and sometimes ecstasy if they were on the nest, but Warren's heroin habit cast a deeply unpleasant shadow over all of us. And they went about things in a laughably acceptable fashion, offering out dabs of speed and lines of coke as others would hand out cigarettes. Occasionally they would bring friends to a session ( they were just tagging along, as Warren always explained), all of them young car thieves and drug users like themselves, and Elliot's beloved drum room would take on the seedy, charmless quality of a drug-pusher's squat.

But the music was special. Throughout the tension, the fights, Warren's mood swings and Cole's increasingly pushy and sometimes insensitive criticism of our act, there was an undeniable feeling that something important was happening. This exploded into reality when we played our first gig together at the Duke in the middle of May. I knew we had played a bummer - Ian was too loud and distorted, Elliot was off to the left with every drumroll, I forgot the chords to half the songs and had to make them up, Paul's amp failed, and Cole was so spaced out that he had to play sitting on a chair. But even so, when I came off stage that night, deafened by the noise, drenched in sweat and beer, my whole body vibrating like a tuning fork, I considered it a performance beyond criticism.

At the end of the day you have to stand by your product and let that product speak for itself. All the practice in the world means nothing unless you can get on stage and do it for real, and all the practice in the world means nothing if the crowd don't scream for more. Your expensive guitars and dazzling effects units are so much glam rock if you haven't got the product behind you. And if you do have the product - if you've got a Warren Pepper or a Mick Jagger or a Dean Fairweather fronting your band - you can sit there bashing biscuit tins and scrubbing washboards for all that anyone cares or notices even.

Like I said before, some people impact on your life. That night at the Duke, Warren Pepper went through the crowd like a bowling ball.

************

We played a lot of gigs during the spring and summer months, gathering an ever-increasing following of rowdy young fans as we snowballed towards an inevitable record deal. Some nights were better than others, naturally, but every show was memorable for one reason or another. Warren continued to change personalities more often then Larry used to change hats, sometimes displaying four or five in a single evening. He could be sulky and aggressive one minute, warm and funny the next. You never quite knew where you stood with the kid, especially if you were a thirty year old virgin with spectacles.

The first time we played out of town ( I think this was a Wednesday, so it must have been Leeds) a coin thrown from the audience clipped Warren on the ear. Warren reacted by leaving the stage and plonking himself down at a table with a group of bemused girls, his arms folded tightly across his chest, and refused to sing until a bouncer had ejected the culprit. I was amazed at his behaviour - we had been absently dodging missiles for more than eight years now.

Shortly before the end of that set, Warren jumped off stage and disappeared for five minutes, leaving me to sing Sometimes Down to cover his absence. He returned for the last song, armed with a handful of ten pence coins, and caused a riot to break out when he began pelting the audience with them. You can't buy that kind of publicity, as the saying goes.

Cole Pepper's three-chord symphonies proved to be as instantly popular with our audiences as they had been with me. Crowds would pick up the chant and join in with the second chorus, at times so enthusiastically that I couldn't hear Warren singing even though I was usually standing right next to him. Ian became frustrated because nobody could hear what he was playing ( and, to be honest, nobody was really listening to what he was playing) and he often talked about leaving.

"It's not just the music," he said to me one night. We would always split into two camps after the shows - Elliot, Paul, Ian and me in one camp, Cole, Warren and their drug-dealing entourage in another."I can't bring my kids to watch me play, not with Sybil picking out the dregs."

We called Warren Sybil after that American lady with all the different personalities. Insulting members of the audience, or picking out the dregs as he innocently explained himself, was another of Warren's less than endearing habits. Consequently you didn't see many Asian faces at our gigs ( You, fuck off out and get me a chicken Madras ) and even fewer black people ( someone kill that fucking coon for me, will ya?).

I understood Ian's misgivings. Alison hadn't been to one of our shows since the night that Warren, slobbering drunk and doped stupid on something or other, yelled at her from the stage to 'stop staring at my fucking cock!' After the show, confronted by myself in a fit of gallant fury, he simply denied all knowledge of the event, but agreed to apologise, which he did in that muttering, resentful way of spoilt brats, just to shut me up.

Then one night in August Warren flatly refused to sing our old songs anymore.

"They're shit," he said.

We were setting up for a prestigious gig at the Duchess of York in Leeds. Warren, as always, was striding back and forth with a Beck's beer bottle in his hand.

"He doesn't mean they're shit," Cole added tactfully.

"Yeah I do, they're shit."

Cole and Warren exchanged a nasty, secretive sneer. I just sat there with my acoustic guitar on my lap, hugging it for security like a big boys' teddy bear, fully understanding this latest development but unable to defend myself against it.

"It's just that my songs are more popular. Makes sense."

And the worst thing of all was that it made perfect sense. Hardly anyone recognised the old songs anymore, because hardly anyone from the old days came to our shows. Our audiences were now wholly made up of Cole and Warren Pepper look-a-likes, cocky lads in Fila coats and pretty but alarmingly young girls who knew the words to all the songs. All of Cole's songs, that is.

************

In the winter Cole came up with the risky idea of making a promotional video instead of a demo tape. Funded by one of his friend's drug deals, we hired a director and crew from the arts college and shot three short films featuring our most commercial numbers.

On To Be Elastic the band played on the floor of the famous Corn Exchange in the centre of Leeds. Permission was granted for this stunt, and consequently nobody got arrested, which is what happened when we filmed the video for Blasted on the steps of Leeds Town Hall at night. We might have got away with it had Warren not finished off by urinating on one of the civic lions that guard the entrance.

The final film, promoting what we believed would be our first single, Madly Does It, was shot on Ilkley moor. It featured the band dressed as tin soldiers, with a surreal circus parade going on around us. Logistically and visually, it was a nightmare, an absolute Elm Street. A promised elephant never arrived ( which, in all honesty, was no big surprise ), the man on stilts kept getting them stuck in the ground, a unicyclist broke a collarbone, the dwarf and the juggling harlequin fell out, and to cap it all it was snowing. In the middle of it all, surrounded by utter absurdity and chaos, my fingers too numb from cold to hold a chord down, I felt as far removed from Flamboyant Gesture as I did from reality itself.

*************

This year didn't pass without its casualty. A few days after the video shoot, Elliot and Clare invited us over to their house for dinner. Alison was worried because we would be obliged to return the invitation, and we didn't have a dining table, just an ironing board and a floral table cloth.

"We can put candles on it," I said as we arrived at Elliot's folly.

"Brilliant!" she cried."We'll put a tea cosy over the iron, then they'll never suspect a thing!"

"Come on, just because Clare's French doesn't mean she's too grand to eat her tea off of an ironing board."

"Dinner," Alison corrected absently."And it's nothing to do with Clare. I'm just sick of apologising for the lack of space."

Elliot answered the door. He was wearing a shirt and tie and his hair had been cut again.

"Can we talk about this later?" I said as we went inside.

We did talk later, though not about moving to a bigger place or, as I suspected, the wider issue of marriage and raising children. We talked about Elliot, because I was down and Alison had always put her life on hold to help me through a band crisis.

After diner, which was French and garlicky and not very filling, Elliot took me into the study and lit up a joint.

"Clare goes bananas when I do this," he said. He drew on the joint as only a man denied can, his eyes closed, a look of spiritual peace settling on his face.

We sat down facing each other in two leather bat-wing chairs, a magnificent hand-carved chess set on a low table between us.

"Do you remember that first day you came here?" Elliot said."You, Paul, Larry, Megan, Ray...Remember, Jimmy?"

"Sure," I said. I took the joint when Elliot offered it."We had a groovy time."

"It was all too beautiful, as the Small Faces used to say." He smiled sadly at me."They were good days those. We could sing other people's songs. Remember California Dreaming? Heroes?"

I nodded, smiling distantly."I remember Megan singing Walking On Sunshine at our very first gig."

"Jimmy, I'm leaving," he said suddenly."My time's up."

************

Elliot's decision was based on a lot of things - Cole and Warren Pepper for one, a lack of musical fulfilment for another - but mostly it was because his life was changing. Of course I argued with him, pleaded with him even. He was my friend, and an ally in a band where my influence was waning by the day, but in the end even I could see that I was only making it harder for him.

"I'm going to miss you," I said, and he got up and silently left the room.

************

Toby Elliot had been with Flamboyant Gesture for nine years. I'd always considered the back row ( and as a rhythm guitarist I felt more in tune with the back row than I did playing in midfield with Larry or on my own) to be the backbone of the band, the solid, unwavering staff for everyone else to lean on. No matter how many times the forward line changed, or how unstable and unpredictable it became, the back row held fast.

Elliot's departure left a mighty big hole in that defensive wall.

Paul was devastated when I gave him the news. He was physically in shock, and I had to get him to lay down with his feet on a stool. A bit melodramatic, I know, but tell us that.

*************

Just before Christmas, Cole replaced Elliot with a friend of his, a nineteen year old apprentice welder named Tony Davenport. Tony had been hanging out with the band for a few months prior to joining. He was a funny kid, a great mimic and largely good natured, but I couldn't take to him because he worshipped the Pepper brothers and tried too hard to be like Warren. More importantly as far as the band were concerned, Tony simply wasn't a good enough player to be in a group of our stature. I certainly wouldn't have chosen him, but then I didn't have much say in the matter.

**************

Ray and Kat threw a small party on New Year's Eve. Everyone was there - Megan and her fiance, Elliot and Clare, Paul; only Larry was missing. Even so, I found myself contemplating the unthinkable. We were all here, still friends, so why didn't we just play together like the old days? Sod the fame and fortune, let's have some fun!

"What are you thinking, Jimmy?"

It was Ray. I felt a strange attack of panic and uncertainty when I noticed the lines around his eyes and the way his hair was just beginning to narrow at the temples. We were thirty years old, still so young but not kids anymore. He handed me a can of lager and we both stood against the wall and watched the party.

"Paul's not courting yet I see."

"No. I don't know why, really. It's not like he's ugly or boring or smells."

"Maybe he's just not the type," Ray said."Some people will always be alone."

"How's the book coming along?" I asked.

"It's finished. I'm re-writing it again."

"Why?"

"Because that's what you do, Jimmy. You keep going back over familiar ground because you're too scared to try something new."

"Have you been talking to Alison, Dr Freud?"

He laughed and wiped a spill of beer from his mouth."So what are you going to do?"

"Go round again," I said."Just one more year."

TEN

At the time I was of the opinion that Cole's idea to make promotional videos instead of a demo tape was little more than an expensive waste of time and resources, but I was proved wrong about that early in the year when one of the films was shown on the Chart Show. Apparently any new or unsigned band could send in their film. If it was good enough ( or, more likely, if it was the only tape sent in that week) it would be shown at the end of the show, when a fresh appeal for new talent was always made. I knew nothing of this because I didn't watch the Chart Show. In fact I gave up showing any interest in the UK charts when I failed to recognise the presenter on Top Of The Pops four weeks in a row. But Cole watched the Chart Show, and Cole was smart enough to seize an opportunity when he saw one. Because most of the amateur videos that were shown tended to feature a pair of goofy bedroom rock stars singing tunelessly into a camcorder, he figured that one of our videos was bound to impress. He was right. So it came to be that Blasted by Flamboyant Gesture, filmed against the elegantly imposing, cathedral-like exterior of Leeds town hall in its most gloriously dramatic evening wear of cobalt blue concealed lighting, was previewed on national television.

I missed it when it was shown but Paul borrowed a video tape of the show from a friend at work and we sat and watched it together. Somehow it didn't compare with those ten seconds of Travelin' Band they showed on Calender News after we played St George's Hall.

Tell Cole that and he would have scoffed, but then he was young and he had never had to struggle for his art and therefore he couldn't appreciate the sweetness of a minor success in quite the same way as I did. Everything had to be big in Cole's eye, and the only route to success was the shortest and fastest, otherwise there wasn't much point in doing it at all. That's why he contacted me in the first place. He could have formed his own band and served a long apprenticeship, riding the ups and downs that shape you as a musician and ultimately as a man, but why should he bother when I had done it all on his behalf? I had cut the track for him, now all he had to do was walk it. Cole loved his music - and he was an artist, despite being a devious, manipulative bastard and a royal pain in the arse - it's just that I didn't believe his love for it ran so deep that ten years from now, if he didn't make the big time, he would be willing to play those songs to a handful of pub quiz players for all the beer he could drink.

The scenario seemed less and less likely following our ambitious debut on the Chart Show, because a week later, after a blinding show at the Duchess of York, a young woman approached us and introduced herself as Joanne Croft, A&R for GO! Discs. Unfortunately Warren just told her to piss off and make some tea, and she promptly walked out. Cole went nuclear and hit him with a bottle. I think he would have killed him had the rest of us not dragged him to the floor.

Cole came round to the flat the next day and spent about an hour just sitting on the sofa in his East German border guard's coat, staring grimly at our wallpaper. My attempts to make light of the matter met with nothing more communicative than a scrunched up frown of annoyance, and so I let him sulk it out while I vacuumed the bedroom and hallway and polished the television screen.

"Madman," he said out of the blue."He's a fucking liability."

"I take it we're talking about Warren?"

Cole answered with a grunt.

"How is he?"

"They let him out with five stitches in his head. He's not talking to me at present. He's gone fishing."

Surprisingly, given his temperament, fishing was Warren's secret passion, though if you tried to converse with him on the subject he would hotly deny that he even owned a rod. All fishermen were boring wankers, see.

"Don't worry about it," I said."It'll blow over."

"I don't give a fuck about Warren. Him and me are always putting each other in hospital. I'm pissed off about that bird from the record company." He sat up straight and moved to the edge of the sofa, the most animated he'd been in an hour."Do you know who Go! Discs are, Jimmy?"

"Never heard of them."

Cole sneered."And you call yourself a Paul Weller fan. They have the Beautiful South too, but they're soft wankers. The point is, Go! Discs isn't some shitty indie label based in a fucking council house. Go! Discs have money and clout. We were on the verge of something big there, and now it's gone, pissed away by that mad bastard."

I could have reminded him about the bomb, and about Ray's imprisonment and Dean's accident, or any number of crisis we'd bounced back from in the past, but that was a different era as far as Cole was concerned, the days of vinyl records and lone policemen walking the beat. I could live with another disappointment. I'd seen it all before, heard all the big promises, built up my hopes only to watch them come crashing down around my ears. I didn't believe for a second that the woman from Go! Discs had come to the Duchess of York with a recording contract in her handbag. She had come to introduce herself, to impress us with her credentials, and probably to make a few big promises that no court of law could ever hold her to. I tried to explain some of this to Cole but he refused to listen.

"I've got to push off," he said."I came to ask you about keyboards actually. Didn't you say you played keyboards?"

"A bit. I'm not Elton John but I can play a tune. Why?"

He shrugged."Thinking about adding keyboards to some of the songs. Expand the sound a bit. You know, don't want to get stale."

Stale, he said. Some of the songs on the current play list were fresher than the milk in our fridge.

I didn't see Cole again for almost three weeks. He phoned me up at midnight to tell me that he couldn't make our next few shows, and that we could either go on without him or wait until he got back.

"From where?" I asked fuzzily. I looked at the clock and blinked. I had to be up for work in four hours.

"From where I am," he said, and hung up.

The next day, only half-convinced that I hadn't dreamt the whole thing, I went to the house. Warren answered the door stark naked. He looked gaunt and pasty and for a second or two he didn't seem to recognise me at all.

"Where's Cole?"

"Eh?"

"Cole?"

"Gone fishing," Warren said."Fuck off now."

The past year had been such an intensely chaotic ( and at times, downright anarchic ) period that I rather enjoyed the short break away from the pressure of being in a rebel rock band. I spent the time relaxing, reading, listening to old records, and catching up on my sleep. I went with Megan to a photographic exhibition in Halifax, to a film with Paul and Elliot, and to the speedway track with Ray. I spent a lot of time with Alison too. I would meet her after work, and arm in arm we would window-shop at Lunn Poly and Thomas Cook, imagining all the far-away places we couldn't afford to visit. We talked about moving to a house, going to Greece again, getting married and having a baby. We had our tea in cheap curry houses and called it dining out. I had forgotten how nice it was to be ordinary, to not have an ambition so rapacious that it knocks aside everything else in your life like a big fat cuckoo chick tossing the other poor chicks over the side of the nest. It was wonderfully liberating to be obsession free.

And then Cole came back.

************

We met with him in the Duke. He arrived chipper and so full of himself that for half an hour he just sat there grinning and winding us up by asking us to guess what his news was.

Warren scratched his chin and appeared to think deeply."Er, is it that you're a complete wanker?"

Cole winked and shook his head.

"A tosser then?"

This went on and on until Cole finally put us out of our misery. It transpired that he had been in London, staying with a friend of his who worked as a cleaner for Islington council. While down there he had met with Joanne Croft from Go! Discs, and the upshot was...we still didn't have a record deal. But we did have financial backing to record a demo tape.

Even Warren was speechless for once. It was unusual for a record company to pay for a band to make a demo tape, but when they did it was because they were reasonably hopeful of signing them on the back of it. The live reports were good, the band was visually innovative, now all they wanted was to hear what we sounded like in the studio.

"This is their money," Cole warned, getting serious for Warren's benefit."So no fucking about in the studio. No fucking tantrums. No walking out just because you can't have your own way."

Warren gazed at us in wide-eyed innocence."What have I done?"

*************

In April we recorded six tracks in a mobile recording studio somewhere in Buckinghamshire. I say somewhere because I don't know precisely where we were based. All I'm really sure of is that Cole and Warren Pepper won't ever be welcome there again.

Trouble was brewing from the moment we arrived. The producer and owner of the studio was a former session musician who had played with the likes of the Who, Thin Lizzy, and Fleetwood Mac. You've got to respect that kind of pedigree no matter how young and arrogant you are - unless you happen to be Cole and Warren Pepper that is, because to Cole and Warren the producer, whose name was Scott Berlin, represented authority and establishment. He was teacher, there to have his dress sense and taste in music poked fun at. Scott viewed the brothers with jaded contempt. He had seen it all before no doubt, right from the days when disgusting young punks were real punks with safety pins and Mohawk haircuts.

To his credit, Scott gave Cole and Warren the benefit of the doubt on that first day of recording and we managed to close the session with some decent bass and rhythm tracks laid down. In the evening I called Alison and apologised for the row we'd had the previous night. She was unhappy about me taking time off work to come down here, even though she understood how important it was to me.

"I'm missing you," I said. She was silent for a long time. I could see her smiling, twirling the telephone cable around her index finger.

"I thought you were a big rock and roll star these days. Big rock and roll stars don't miss their girlfriends."

"Well I do. I want to come home. I can't wait until it's finished."

"Hurry up then," she said. Then we said some stuff you probably don't want to hear, but I had to hang up because Paul needed to phone his mother.

We were staying at a farmhouse about a mile outside a pretty village that was straight from the lid of a biscuit tin. It had a quaint little bandstand and its own dinky cricket pavilion, a small church and a solitary pub called The Haymaker. Paul, Ian and myself went for a meal there after we had showered and shaved at the digs. We didn't tell the others where we were going. We figured they would try to find a nightclub somewhere, but around ten o'clock they came swaggering through the door like three outlaw gunslingers on coke. Warren immediately plonked himself at a table with two women whose husbands were playing darts.

"Our kid!" he shouted across the bar."I don't fancy yours!"

I saw the husbands exchange hesitant glances. They were both in their mid thirties, I reckoned, which is old enough to know how dangerous a kid like Warren can be. I felt sorry for them but I didn't feel like getting into a row with Warren on someone else's behalf.

Cole and Tony Davenport joined us at the table we had been sharing with Scott Berlin and his girlfriend Heather, whom I vaguely recognised from an old shampoo commercial. It had been a great evening up until then. Scott had been indulging us with stories about Phil Lynott and Mick Fleetwood, but when Cole and Tony arrived at the table he smiled grimly at me and said it was time they were going.

"What's wrong with Whispering Bob?" Cole asked, sneering at their backs as they were leaving. Warren had named Scott Whispering Bob but don't ask me why. It was just a name.

"I expect they're tired."

"Shagging I bet," Cole said."If I had a bird like that I'd be shagging her all the time. I'd never get out." He clapped his hands together. Paul, who was nodding off, blinked in alarm."Never mind lads. We'll have all the birds we can eat once we take off. Even you, Tuck."

Friar Tuck was one of Warren's plethora of silly nicknames for Paul. In this case it related to Paul's almost monastic lifestyle, which is how Warren saw it in any case. Warren had also christened him Shaggy, Superman, Mr Muscles, Norman Bates, and, after Paul had scolded his wrist making tea, the Burnt Man of Alcatraz. Naturally I was called Pat, Postman Twat, Baggy ( because of what nine years of getting up before the sun had done to my eyes), Bollock Face, Conker, Dogbite, and Grasshopper, because I walked everywhere.

"Oh yeah," Cole said, staring suspiciously at the liquid in his glass."We've been kicked out of the digs. All your gear's in the car park." He looked at our dumbstruck faces and simply cocked a thumb in Warren's direction.

We spent the night in the pub, which we had to pay for with our own money. Things got worse the next day when Warren came to the studio in his awkward and uncooperative personality, then transformed into Mr Pisstaker when he realised that nobody was paying attention to him. I could see Scott growing more and more annoyed with him as the day progressed. He finally snapped when Heather dropped by with a few sandwiches and beers, and Warren, deadpan, asked her if she would mind doing a turn for the lads.

It wasn't much of a fight. Warren was still smirking at Heather's bewildered reaction when Scott stepped into his line of vision and floored him with a single punch.

"Little cunt," he growled, standing over Warren with his fists at the ready."I've shit blokes like you before now."

Warren took a few minutes to regain his senses, but once he had it needed every member of the band to drag him back to the floor again.

"I'll fucking burn this place!" he screamed, thrashing around like a fish."I'll fucking burn it down! And him-" Warren's head came up, the muscles in his scrawny neck pulling tight and proud beneath his skin."I'll fucking do for him!"

Later in the afternoon, made placid by valium and a private conversation with Cole, Warren went back into the studio and finished his vocals. Luckily we didn't need him again. We put down the main guitar parts the next day, backing vocals and keyboards the day after, then went home, leaving Scott to do the mixing and fill in any bits we'd messed up. It was a pretty depressing and disappointing experience, not half as exciting as recording Phoenix.

**************

I came home from work one afternoon not long after the demo tape fiasco to find Alison watching television with a box of Roses between her knees.

"Are you sick?" I asked.

"I will be if I eat anymore of these." She offered the box but I ignored it.

"What are you doing at home?"

"I live here."

"Yeah, but you're supposed to be at work."

Then, bafflingly, she laughed and pointed at me.

"What?" I asked worriedly, patting my face for bits of bloody tissue or enormous zits."What are you laughing at me for?"

"I'm invading your territory," she said, gazing at me slyly."I came home to see what you get up to in the afternoons."

"Silly cow." I sat down next to her and took a chocolate from the box.

"That's mine," she said, plucking the miniature bar of Dairy Milk from my fingers."I got dibs on them."

I smiled and shook my head. I was mystified by her playful mood but not about to question it too deeply.

"Go get a shower," she said. She gave me a wrinkled smile and patted my knee."You smell."

I always drop my gear in the bedroom, then, naked, I walk to the bathroom and take a shower. Once I've stripped away the grime of a working day, I return to the bedroom, still naked, and mess up all the drawers rooting for a clean tee shirt and underwear. It's a ritual I look forward to. On this occasion I returned from my shower, still damp and smelling of lemons, to find a large, coffin-shaped box laying on the bed. Next to it were a clean pair of white boxer shorts, socks, a new tee-shirt, and a plain white envelope.

"Alison?"

No reply. I looked over my shoulder, then at the box, then back over my shoulder again. Intrigued, I danced into the fresh clothes and then picked up the envelope. There was a card inside. It wasn't my birthday or the day we had both agreed should be our anniversary.

"Open it, moron," came Alison's voice from behind me.

I turned around to see her standing in the doorway, her arms folded across her chest. All of a sudden there was something about her that I couldn't put my finger on. She looked just the same as she always did - pretty, natural, a bit tired - and yet different. Strangely young and vulnerable. For some unknown reason I felt the need to hold her.

"What's in the box?"

"Open your card first."

I shook my head stubbornly. I was inexplicably afraid."No. You've got cancer. I know you've got cancer."

Alison gasped and covered her mouth. Her eyes were laughing at me.

"It's something like that," I rattled on."It's something bad like cancer, I know it."

"Jimmy!"

"Alright, alright."

My fingers tore at the seal ( which she had licked and thumped) until I could slip the card out of the envelope. On it was a cartoon depicting a smug cat about to devour a whole fish. The caption bugled CONGRATULATIONS! More confused than ever, I could only look at Alison and wait for an explanation.

"Now the box," she said quietly."Go on."

So I opened the box and found inside the Yairi nylon twelve-string guitar that I'd soulfully coveted ever since I saw it in the window of Austin's guitar shop when we were meant to be window shopping for exotic holidays. It was over twenty years old, Robert Austin told me when I sneaked back without Alison to inquire about the price...and to hold it, stroke it, wish it was mine. The only previous owner, reputedly, was one Steve Hackett, former member of Genesis, but I wasn't to hold Robert to that.

"But it cost a bomb," I said, still entranced by the thrilling, strangely mystical sight of this beautiful guitar laying dormant in its coffin like an enchanted princess. Poetic cack, yeah, but tell me that. I'd dreamed of this guitar, and despite my advancing years I had nevertheless promised God that I would be an exceptionally good boy if I could only wake up and find it at the foot of my bed. And now it was here, but no thanks to God. This was Alison's gift, to go with the card, but why?

Then the answer hit me with the force of a body punch. We had done it. Cole must have heard from Go! Discs. We had a record contract.

I turned to Alison, about to ask if this was the case, when I saw that she was starting to cry. Now I felt scared again.

"What is it?" I asked, going to her."What's wrong?"

"I'm pregnant," she said."Congratulations."

We both burst into tears. Corny, we know, but tell us that.

************

The guitar wasn't so much to soften the blow as to mark a turning point in our lives. As Alison quite rightly said, it was the last toy I would get for a long, long time - maybe as long as thirty years or more judging by how much we still relied on our parents to bail us out of trouble.

The next day, while Alison was at work, I took the guitar back to Austin's. I could live without toys, I figured, just so long as my kid didn't have to start life in a cot his parents had bought at a car boot sale.

It turned out that Alison had only taken the guitar on approval. Sneaky bitch or what?

************

As Alison's little swell began to grow, I found myself thinking more and more about Ray, and how the birth of his child had changed him from a surly, aggressive lout to a mature, responsible young man. It took the murder of that child to change him back, and ultimately a prison sentence to straighten him out again. Things had happened in the wrong order for Ray: It should have been bomb, prison, baby. The end result would have been the same, with Ray becoming a model citizen possessed with the kind of hope and optimism in his soul that only tragedy can make or break in you, but things would have made more sense if God hadn't screwed up with the jigsaw pieces.

I wasn't changed yet but I was changing. I began to take a serious interest in television debates on education for one thing, and advertisements featuring cute toddlers made me smile instead of want to puke ( smiling back at the baby, Alison said one time, and almost wet herself laughing at me), but I'm not just talking about those kind of things. My whole perception of life was rapidly changing. I gave a lot of thought to the purpose of existence, the meaning of life if you will, and a kind of peaceful revelation came to me. If it wasn't about making records and playing in a band, maybe the answer was as fundamental as the desire to reproduce, to raise a family and then sit back and watch them leave you one by one. Eventually you die but something of yours lives on in your childrens' eyes, in your grandchildrens' hair, in your great grandchildrens' love of music. In a sense you keep coming around again; you're unforgettable, like a great chorus.

************

Negotiations between executives at Go! Discs and our new London-based management company failed to produce a record deal. The stumbling block was Warren Pepper. Bad reports from Scott Berlin had left Go! Discs feeling very, very nervous about putting more time and money into the band. They simply weren't convinced that Warren would last through the recording of a whole album let alone sustain himself through a career. They liked his singing, and they were astute enough to realise what a potentially valuable commodity he could be, but they didn't believe in him.

"He'll be dead before he's twenty," Cole said to me after a meeting with Go! Discs had ended in yet another stalemate."That's why they won't sign us."

"Twenty's being optimistic," I told him."Go! Discs are frightened because they think Warren will self-destruct in the next few months, leaving them with a white elephant on their hands. That's why they won't sign us."

In an attempt to provoke competition we played a handful of small gigs in the capitol, using up more of my valuable holiday time at the Post Office.

"I can't believe you've been with this band for nine and a half years and never played in London," Cole said one time.

"We set off once," I told him."It got foggy and we never made it."

While the gigs were largely ignored by the public they did have the desired effect in raising a sniff of interest from other record companies, namely Virgin and BMG ( I could have added EMI records to that short list but Warren spat on their A&R man in the Hope and Anchor). As a result Go! Discs panicked a little and offered the band a compromise, which was to put us on salary until after we'd completed a European tour with the Beautiful South. The deal was put to us at the Golden Square office of our management company.

"Tell them to fuck it," Cole said."Go back to Virgin and see what they come up with."

Our agent, Richard Endercotte, had a degree in contract law and wasn't about to tell anyone to fuck anything. He was slightly younger than me and looked like a man who slept well enough. I thought of asking him how long it took to get yourself in a position where you could, theoretically, choose between two good careers, or even alternate between the two: Lawyer one day, agent to the stars the next. About ten years, he would probably have answered, which was about the length of time I had spent with the band. The more I thought about it the more I wanted to get up and go home.

"What do you think, Jimmy?"

"I think you should decide," I said. It was the closest I could come to admitting to myself that I no longer cared.

"Then I say take the deal while it's still on the table," Richard said. There was a brief argument, much of it silly and irrelevant. Cole was adamant that another record company would still come forward with a record contract, and Richard told him to stop being arrogant and naive. Warren didn't want to tour with the Beautiful South because they were wet Hull bastards, and Richard told him to grow up. I didn't want to tour because my girlfriend was pregnant and I would be dreadfully homesick, but I didn't tell Richard.

***************

Using the small budget we'd been given for expenses, Cole hired a rehearsal studio in Leeds and the band began to get in shape for the tour. It was about this time that the landlord of the Duke approached me with the idea of doing a concert to mark Flamboyant Gesture's ten year association with the pub. Cole and Warren scoffed at the idea but Cole eventually agreed to do it. I think the notion of a triumphant return to our roots after a major tour appealed to his ego.

That same Wednesday night in the Duke, John Mullins brought the Thursday Night Northern Blitz to an end.

"I'm getting too old, Jimmy," he confessed."I can't get out of bed in the mornings. I'm always tired. And these little shits-" He cast a contemptuous eye over the gaggle of bobble hats and Fila coats congregated around the pool table."They wouldn't know good music if it came up and smacked them in the chops. One of them asked me if I had any Paul Weller the other night, and I offered to play a Jam record. Do you know what the little oik said to that?"

"Who are the Jam?"

"Who are the fucking Jam?" John echoed despondently."They don't even know that Paul Weller was in the Jam. To them he's just an old git who rides a scooter and occasionally makes a decent record. That's why I'm jacking it in."

"It's the end of an era," I said, and John nodded pensively."Thursday nights will never be the same again."

***************

I was on a six month leave of absence from my job. I'd talked it through with Alison, and she said that I should follow my heart. The trouble was my heart was at home. The one time I needed her to put her foot down and block my path and what does she go and do? She gives me her blessing. I'll never understand women so long as I live.

*

It was agreed, albeit at Cole's insistence, that I play keyboards on the tour. Those piano lessons I had with Sandy came in useful but they couldn't disguise the fact that I was a guitarist. Even so, Cole refused to back down and return me to my rightful place. I should have had an ally in Ian but he was content to let the bickering wash over him. Everyday he would arrive at the studio, plug in, play, and then go home again. It was just a job to Ian, a means of providing for his family. It should have been that way for me now that I was pregnant, but the band was still my child too. Sure, she had gone off the rails, teamed up with bad company, but I couldn't stop loving her or caring about her because of that. There was a bond between us that went deeper than a working relationship. Flamboyant Gesture would always be my baby.

And it was Paul's baby too, he and me being the only original members left. I sometimes forgot how much he loved the band, and how much he needed it in his life. Socially Paul and me had drifted apart, but here we were all the same, still swapping football stickers and playing conkers together after all these years. We were family, Paul and me. I made the biggest mistake of my life when I put the band before him.

The rehearsal finished early that day. Ian packed his guitar away and dashed off home. Paul said he was going out to Leeds market to pick up some vegetables for his mother. I was going with him until Cole told me he had something important to tell me in private.

"He's got to go," Cole said.

"Who's got to go?"

"Fucking superman," Warren put in. He was slouching in one of the moulded plastic chairs, a fishing hat pulled over his eyes, tapping the base of the ever present Beck's beer bottle against the wooden floor."He just don't keep the beat, man."

"Fuck!" I spat."Paul's a good bass player. He was playing bass when you were still playing marbles."

Warren lifted his hat and puckered his lips.

"He can play alright," Cole said."He just doesn't look right."

"You don't fucking look right!" I almost screamed. Not the most articulate response I could have given, granted, but I was furious and upset and simply overwhelmed by the shock of it all.

"Boom-boom's been learning to play bass," Cole went on. He appeared oblivious to my state but I think that was deliberate."Boom-boom wants to join."

Boom-boom ( so christened by Warren because of the way he described his supposed fights: I hit him once - boom! then I hit him again - boom!) had been hanging with the Pepper brothers since he and Warren were thrown out of school together. His real name was Wayne something or other. He rode a scooter and dressed like a mod.

"Boom-boom's not joining this band," I said, brandishing a finger. It was then that Warren slipped out of the chair and stood beside his brother, so I put my finger away. It hit me then, the futility, the defeat, the resignation, and the final understanding that I was no longer an influence in this band. I had no authority to argue with Cole. He had the majority on his side. He could throw me out of the band if he wanted to.

"You tell him," Cole said."I don't want him to commit fucking suicide or something."

"That's your job," I said, picking up my keyboard case."It's your band."

*

It didn't take much cunning to avoid Paul these days. That in itself was another poignant little arrow in my heart. There was a time when we lived across the road from one another, sat next to each other at school, and walked home together. In those days it took physical detours and much furtive darting behind bushes and trees to avoid bumping into each other in the wake of a row, and even then it would only be a matter of hours before our paths inevitably crossed and one of us felt compelled to mutter a greeting. But when we fell out in those days it was usually over trivial small boy stuff like records and football games. Our loyalty to each other was never questioned.

Alison said that I should go and see him, and I knew she was right, I knew that's what she would do in my position, but I doubted that she had ever betrayed her best friend.

"You haven't betrayed him," she said, gazing at me across the candle-lit ironing board."It's Cole who should be feeling guilty, not you."

I shook my head miserably."I should have done more to defend him."

"Do you want that chop?" Alison scooped up my plate and scraped a lamb chop, two large potatoes and a dozen or so string beans onto her own plate."What more could you have done, Jimmy? Ian wouldn't have backed you up, you said so yourself. Cole's got Warren and Tony on his side."

"I could have quit the band, that's what I could have done."

She put down her knife and fork and touched the back of my hand, drawing my eyes from the gravy stain on the gingham cloth I had been glumly focused on.

"Is that what you want to do?"

"I want a shot at success. I deserve it."

"Then that's what you have to do. But go and see Paul before you leave. Make up with him, Jimmy, because if you don't do it now there might not be a way back in the future."

She was right. She was always right. The next evening I called to his house and knocked on the front door. Paul's face appeared briefly at his bedroom window. The emotions inside me were not unlike those I had experienced when Alison had put aside our big tiff to visit me in hospital after the crash. I was scared and sick to my stomach with nerves.

Finally he opened the door, stuck a letter in my hand, then closed the door again.

That was all he wrote.

*

There was hardly anyone in the park that September afternoon, just a scattering of fishermen at the water's edge and a small boy with a bamboo net poking studiously at the fry which darted through the weedy, sunlit shallows with stricken urgency. Iridescent dragonflies hovered and zipped above the languid ripples. There wasn't a breath of wind to ruffle the treetops. The only voices were the distant cries of children playing in the surrounding wood, and occasionally the mysterious splash of some microcosmic drama or tragedy breaking the surface of the pond. There was something in the air that smelled vaguely sweet and vaguely stagnant, something old and elusive and aching like a memory.

It was my turn on the bench. I sat down and watched a young man about the same age as myself join the little boy at the water's edge, and I thought about all those things I told you about before, about the bomb blast, about Paul and me, and before I knew it there were tears running down my face.

I cried because I didn't understand how I had arrived at a point in my life where all my friends had moved on without me. For ten years I had casually barged aside my friends and loved ones and those who looked up to me in the selfish, single-minded pursuit of an ambition. If I had only stopped to look around me instead of always squinting at the horizon I would have seen that I had it all. I had a great rock and roll band, the best friend a man could ever wish for, a partner who loved me, and all the hope and energy my youth could muster. I had it all. I was a success. But even now I was virtually powerless to break the spell. My girlfriend was six months pregnant and I was about to leave her for one last shot at my dream. When I formed Flamboyant Gesture I thought I was building a legacy, but all the time I was creating a monster.

I wiped my face on my tee-shirt and went to buy a can of pop from the cabin to lubricate my dry throat. The young man netting fry with his son looked up at me as I passed, a curious smile on his face.

"Jimmy isn't it?" he asked."Is it Jimmy?"

His face was familiar but I couldn't put a name to it. Maybe it was someone I once worked with.

"Thought it was you," the man said. He stood up and wiped his hands on the front of his jeans."Remember me?"

Suddenly I did. It was whatsisname-

"Frank."

-Frank, our very first drummer, the one who never actually played with us.

"Hello, Frank," I said. He had changed of course. He was ten years older. We all were."What are you up to?"

"Just catching a few little fish with the lad."

"Your lad, is it?"

Frank smiled proudly at the youngster."My eldest. I've got two daughters. Twins."

"Amazing," I said, and Frank tilted his head quizzically."You know, what time does. It's been a long time since I last saw you."

"Must be."

"Ten years," I said, and Frank blinked in astonishment.

"Really? Has it really been ten years?"

"Just about."

"So what about you, have you got a family?"

I mirrored his proud smile. It came quite naturally."One on the way."

"Great. What do you do?"

"I'm a postman. What about you?"

"I've got an amusement arcade in Burridge Head. We're just over here visiting my parents."

"Right, right. You always did like the fruit machines."

Frank laughed loudly. The boy gazed up from the water's edge, his eyes half-shut against the glare of the yellow sun.

I shook Frank's hand for old time's sake. As I was walking away he called my name.

"Did I miss much, leaving the band?" he asked. The boy stood up and tugged his father's hand, eager to show him some new wonder in the pond.

"A few laughs," I said."Lots of memories."

**********

I used to believe that the whole point of being in a rock and roll band was to make records, but I don't think like that anymore. It's about doing what you love, with the people you love, whether it's for a year or ten years or for the rest of your life. It doesn't matter if you're a rock star or a writer or a poet or an artist or a postman or a clerk at the DSS, if you love what you do you'll always be happy, you'll always be a success.

In the beginning there was just us and the music, and a simple, innocent belief in what we were doing. All philosophical arguments were three and a half minutes long, and if you couldn't make it rhyme it wasn't worth saying. Life was simple, three chords, twelve bars, repeat chorus, take a bow and get ready to do it all over again the next night. And if real life noises occasionally broke into the fantasy, you just had to play louder.

And later, when it wasn't possible to play over the noise, I just had to ignore it until it stopped. When the bombs went off, when my friends cried out for help, I turned up my amp and lost myself in music. It's only rock and roll, right? Like it's only life itself. I had an ambition, a dream to chase, and if you couldn't keep up, well...goodbye, stranger.

But some revelations creep up on you; it's like getting fat or getting older - you don't feel it happening, but one day you might look down and wonder where your feet have gone, or catch a glimpse of yourself in a mirror and realise you look faintly ridiculous in a baseball cap. You're older and wiser, and suddenly the dream you once chased doesn't fill your head so much. You go acoustic. For the first time in your life the words and melody are more important than the volume. That's when you finally realise you were never in it for the money or the fame, only the glory of being there and the greatest hits of memories that resonate in your mind like the end of Hey Jude. You want your friends back again, and you'll do anything to put things right.

***********

It took two whole days to organise what I'm about to show you next, so I won't bother you with the details, suffice to say that I was so busy I forgot to go on tour. Ah, well maybe I didn't forget exactly, maybe I just sat down and listed my priorities in the correct order.

************

Paul came out of the house and almost trod on Bohemian Rhapsody. Startled, he knelt down to look at the label. When he saw the rest of them - 45's, albums, cassettes, twelve-inch singles - snaking down the garden path and out of the front gate and all the way to the back of the rented van, where I was waiting, he toppled onto his arse. But then he's always been a bit melodramatic.

"Bohemian Rhapsody," I said."The first Queen single we ever bought. We went halves."

Paul looked up at me, blinking confusedly.

"Look at the next one," I said."Vienna on clear vinyl. You swapped it for my copy of Watching The Detectives."

He struggled to his feet and absently dusted the back of his trousers.

"Don't Stop Me Now," I continued."Picture cover. We argued about the words. You insisted that it went 'Two hundred good reasons why they call me Mr far and wide'."

He started to say something but the words wouldn't come.

"If you don't look at them I'm going to snap them into little pieces and feed them through your letterbox."

"You wouldn't do that." He was blinking rapidly now, afraid that I might just do that to our precious record collection.

"They're only records, Paul. Plastic. It's what's behind them that counts. Go on, look at them."

He took a few hesitant steps forward, his head down, lips lips moving silently.

"Please Don't Go by KC and the Sunshine Band: It was the last record at Debbie Magee's birthday party. I danced with Debbie, you danced with Charlotte Smith and broke her little toe. Geno, Dexy's Midnight Runners: I said the singer was black, you said he wasn't. Soundtrack from Grease: We queued at the Odeon in Leeds for three hours and slicked our hair back with Brylcreem the day after. Genesis Live: You bought that one from Valance's the day it closed down. All Mod Cons: We used to sit on Mod wall every Saturday afternoon in our red Harringtons and look at all the girls in their two-tone dresses. Generals and Majors by XTC: I bought you that when you had your tonsils out."

Paul looked up quickly, his magnified eyelashes beating like wings.

"Africa by Toto: It was playing on the radio the day we left school. Dare by Human League: Playing in Shines bar when we met those two New Romantic chicks and nearly got off with them. Keep On Loving You: Was it pronounced R-E-O Speedwagon or Rio Speedwagon? We never did finish that row."

Now he was walking, his back bent as he read the labels on my path of memories."Hersham Boys," he said almost under his breath."We were at Butlins when...Sunday Girl!"

"Ah, sweet Debbie Harry: Our first wank, if I remember correctly."

Paul glanced up and grinned shyly. Slowly he followed my path to its conclusion, sometimes murmuring the titles of the songs and smiling faintly at the distant memory behind it. Not all of them are good memories ( but then not all of them are good records), but they are an undeniable part of us, just like him and me are part of each other. There's barely a memory in my collection that doesn't feature Paul. I wanted him to see that he couldn't shake me, like he couldn't shake the memories or the end of Hey Jude, that I might fade out but not fade away.

When he reached the van I handed him the last record in the collection. It was a tape this time - Phoenix, by Flamboyant Gesture.

"What happened to the tour?" he said.

"I didn't go."

He went,"Der," and we began to pick up the records.

************

**************

On December the fifteenth, ten years after we first played together, Flamboyant Gesture took to the stage for the last time. The house was packed. The band waited at the foot of the stage as I stepped into the spotlight.

"Ladies and gentlemen," I said."My name's Jimmy Connor. Some of you may know me. I've been here before - many times, in fact. You see I've been with this band for ten years. In the beginning I thought that being in a rock and roll band was all about making records, but now I'm ten years older and I know better. Recording isn't the achievement, it's just a way of proving to others what you already know. The achievement is doing it, living it, loving what you do for a year or ten years or the rest of your life. It's about making memories. It's listening to a great song on the radio and smiling to yourself, remembering when you didn't want to be alive at twenty five and rock and roll suicide was the only credible way out. It's about the people you've loved and fought with, the people here tonight as well as absent friends. It's about the lights, the show, the crowd, the music. It's about being so proud of what you've achieved that you can't begin to tell anyone. It's about moving on. It's about bringing it back and letting it go, and it's about reaching a point in your life where things have run their course, and there's nothing left to do but say you've had fun, say you're proud, say you'll never forget and never regret a single moment, then say thankyou, goodnight, and sing one last song for the road, repeat chorus and fade away.

"So for the very last time, allow me to introduce to you: On bass guitar, Paul Smith...Playing drums, Mr Toby Elliot...On lead guitar and vocals, the fabulous Ray Myers...Singing lead vocals, the beautiful diva of the Duke, Megan Thomas...On tambourine and comfy chair, the fattest woman in the house, Alison Stead...And last but not least, on second tambourine and backing vocals, Katrina Myers.

"Ladies and gentlemen, we are the one and only Flamboyant Gesture."

Then from the back came Elliot's melodiously laconic count in, and despite the fact that I was looking forward to the future with all the hope and optimism my ageing bones could muster, I felt the million pieces of my broken heart dividing like cells.

"One...two...three...four..."

***********

At the end of the show I experienced a moment of pure terror; all of a sudden there was nothing beneath my feet and I was freefalling. But then...relief, yes, that's what hit me next, a wave of relief that touched me like the sight of a long lost friend.

There was only time for one encore, one last song, and I did it alone. It started with me, and as Ray rightly said, it was up to me to close the circle. So I took my acoustic guitar on stage and sang Heroes. I didn't sing for the crowd this time, I sang for Alison and Kat, for Megan, Ray, Paul and Elliot, and for Dean and Larry, wherever they might be. I sang my heart out, and by the end of the song the emotion of the evening had caught up with me. I wanted to say something poignant, something that would live on after the music had faded away, something that would keep coming back to them like a great chorus, but I couldn't find the words. So I just said thankyou, goodnight, and then it was finally time to leave the stage.

**************

ENCORE

**************

You've been a wonderful audience, but now I really must be going. There's just time for a few bonus tracks for those of you with a compact disc player:

To his credit, Cole Pepper held the band in check and completed the tour with the Beautiful South. The performances themselves were scrappy and forgettable but the idea had been to monitor the band's durability ( pretty ironic that, in the face of the history that Cole and his crew adopted ), and at the end of the tour Flamboyant Gesture signed a three album deal with Go! Discs. The first album, Elastic Fantastic by The Gesture, as they came to be known, was released a short time ago to mixed reviews. I've no doubt that Cole and Warren Pepper will be huge stars one day, but I think it will take a little longer than they imagined. Maybe as long as ten years, if they can last that long.

Somehow I can't relate The Gesture to the band I started all those years ago. They became who they are through a long and sometimes painful process of evolution, but to me they could be a bunch of strangers with a coincidental name. It comes down to that old question about the spade: If you buy a new head for your spade one year, and a new handle the next year, have you got a new spade? The sense of association is remote and dream-like, while the affection I felt for the band left with me. In press and television interviews, Cole cryptically refers to me as 'the other one'. I didn't even merit a mention on the sleeve notes. But I don't worry about it too much, because I'm on that album whether Cole likes it or not. We're all there somewhere, if you listen closely enough, the haunting resonance of a ghost band.

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Inside Out, a novel by Ray Myers, is currently available at all good bookshops. His second novel, Repeat Chorus And Fade Away, is due out soon. It claims to be the story of a rock and roll institution. I told him it had all been done before but he doesn't seem to care about that. There's always room for another rock and roll story, he says.

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Paul's dating a young Thai girl called Mia. He did not, I repeat did not, get her out of a catalogue, which is what Ray seems to think. They met at a singles disco in Leeds run by John Mullins and patronised largely by married men on the prowl and single mothers in lumpy white leggings - and those are John's words, not mine. But despite his superficial cynicism John continues to spin the discs and give hope to the lonely. It worked for Paul, he says, so it could, theoretically, work for anyone.

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Megan married last year. She got hitched to that research chemist and now they run a smallholding near Holmfirth. They rescue very old sheep and goats ( including Elliot's ancient nanny) and have virtually no money. The place smells of shit but when you point this out to Megan she looks genuinely puzzled and says you must be imagining things. I thought of asking her why the pair of them chose to give up all that lucrative chemistry stuff and live in rural poverty with two dozen geriatric farm animals, but if I can't work that one out for myself then I haven't learnt a thing from the last ten years of my life.

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Elliot still lives in that crazy house with Clare. These days he drives a BMW and carries a mobile phone everywhere he goes. We have to tell him when it's ringing. For Christmas I think I'll buy him one of those vibrating phones. Alison says she wants one too.

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And back to me, or us, as I have become. My son was born a week after that last show at the Duke. I wanted to name him Duke but Alison told me to act my age. We settled for Dean, after a kid I once knew.

His dad still plays in a band. We're called Spent Force, and we play social clubs and birthday parties about once a month or so. We do cover version of old classics, but every now and again, if requested, we might do She's Not To Be Trusted or one of those other raves from the grave. So it's rock and roll cabaret, but tell us that.

A vacancy exists for a good keyboard player if you know where we can find one. Not just any keyboard player mind; he has to be the right one. We'll leave it open a while longer yet, I figure, just in case the right man should come through the door.

That's that then. We hope you enjoyed the show. Now have a safe journey home.

Thankyou.

And goodnight.

FLAMBOYANT GESTURE HAVE LEFT THE BUILDING

THE END