The Time Traveller
3: Rookland 16-03-84
I have never had a good memory, and I learned a few years back that I am also nothing if not a very contradictory man. It’s not mine, though. It’s borrowed, but I have every confidence in it. That’s why we do our research.
Upon arriving at the venue, we made a quick trek to the Stage Door, just in case. The door was slightly ajar, and Corakayla was busy in conversation with a Roadie, and getting nowhere fast. Everyone else hung back. I couldn’t help myself. I just had to look, even if it was only at a flight case with the stencilled Woodrowe logo on the side. And I saw such a perfectly beautiful sight.
Susie Curfew. She was drinking from a juice box. Oh, I wanted her! Is it the sexual proclivity made rampant? To rape - to control? It would be so easy. Too easy. She’s just over there, on her own. This is madness! Yet instinct is always truthful?
“Bloody minded, fuddy duddy, old, hairy -“ Corakayla was muttering to herself as she walked past me.
“No luck?” I asked, quite unnecessarily.
“Roadies.” she explained, concisely.
We returned to the others, she a few steps ahead of me.
Inside the venue, we decided to stick together. Corakayla and Loffie danced happily together, spinning each other round and round like a whirling dervish on happy pills. The guys did what guys did, like standing at a urinal, not too close, spread out a little and dribbling liquid - in this case beer in glass bottles - upon the already intensely sticky floor from months of accumulated beer and human by-products, shoes making that slick-slick noise on the sticky floor, picking up who knows what on the soles of those shoes. But no one really cared. Even the mosh pit contained smily violence. It was the legacy, in the making right here, of Woodrowe. Except watching these young people enjoying themselves headbanging, rocking out and moshing - in the middle aged, it just looked odd. The skin had stretched, the bellies were full and nostalgia was rampant, even if the urges weren’t anymore.
I remember a gig I went to, full of the delights of nutterdom. There was this lunatic who kept getting in other peoples faces, trying to rile us, trying to get a rise. Maybe he just wanted a fight, but he would lean over the balcony of the venue and make a prat of himself. He got his desired affect eventually. A young couple, the man trying ineffectually to guard his girl against this lunatic, the boyfriend in heated argument, broken only by venue security, obviously smashed out of his head - later, that same idiot came up behind me while I walked home from the gig. He congratulated me on not rising, “You’re alright.” he mewled and went on his merry way. I don’t know what it meant, even now. I don’t even know why I thought of it. Oh, right. Strangeness at gigs. Something like that.
“I love this song!” screamed Corakayla suddenly, excited. It was ‘Beautiful Brunette’, one of Woodrowe’s more pop-py songs, “I’m going up the front!”
Viv was always sensible, “It’s dangerous! Be careful!” he yelled back.
“You worry too much!” screamed Corakayla wickedly, dragging a giggling Loffie with her, seeping into the crowd like viscous liquid through a colander.
“I’m going with them!” insisted Comfy. Just the one you needed in a crisis. Or he caused the crises. Comfy was a complicated little ball of energy. One minute he could be the most absurd, insane daredevil you’ve ever seen, and the next minute he’s as his nickname implies - comfy. Like a down filled pillow and only a modicum of vomit on his jeans.
Up came ‘She’s Too Young And She Knows It’, and so did Comfy, followed by a sheepish pair of girls, suddenly aware of what a particularly male-oriented room meant.
“That bastard touched me! There! You know!” screamed Corakayla, understandably incensed.
“And another had his hands all over my breasts!” insisted Loffie, no less put out.
“Comfy?!” shouted Freddie, suddenly the protective Father.
Comfy was about to answer, when Corakayla answered for him, “That man is an absolute saint! He pushed them off, punched one of them! Then we came back here!” Loffie nodded vigorously in agreement.
“Security?” I asked.
“Looking the other way! Eyeing some girl with her knockers out!” screamed Corakayla. I couldn't help chuckle, but I hid it well. Oh, memories -
Loffie, she looked so lost suddenly, so - cute - just standing there, biting her lip, hands protectively fidgeting about her head, you know the kind of thing - brushing her long, beautiful hair from her drooping, sad eyes? No one that young, that beautiful should ever be sad. I put my arm about her, and she accepted it. She didn't reciprocate, I didn't expect her too. She just needed someone to ground her to reality, to prove she was really there and not floating about, outside her body, dreaming this. Some might say it was only a quick fondle of her bits. Those people would be utter bastards.
“They looked like they were in a group of other idiots!” remarked Comfy, loudly, a need to unload. Adrenaline has that way, I know, “They looked a bit tasty! I think we should just wait until we’re chucked out, then take the well-lit way to the Station!” This wasn't like Comfy, and everyone saw it. No one spoke, but the looks said it all. When Comfy was scared, something was seriously up.
“Next time, we all go up! We stay as one, okay? Okay?”
“Yes Dad.” said Comfy.
“Agreed, Freddie!” said the rest.
#
You know, the more I think about it, and there are times I think about it far too much, for far too long - granted that and many other thoughts racing about in my head looking for purchase, like a sea of clay waiting for the shapes to emerge and make form - I don’t think Dad actually wanted kids?
As I think about it, the man I should have admired, I should have wanted to be, was stolen from me one time I was visiting relatives. There I found out he wasn't the hero I thought he was. He was a turd - an alcoholic, workaholic, chain smoking - he died because he was a selfish man. I can barely remember now anything but the worst of him - the rude, aggressive, lovelessness - so that the bits I can remember are when he was mostly a bigoted arsehole.
Even still, I don’t think that idiot of a neighbour, while I was woken up by my Mom, informing me the man I had very much seen alive not a few hours ago was not only dead, but was literally just being loaded into the Ambulance.
How I slept through it all, I don't know. Perhaps instinct told me to remain unconscious.
Anyway, that neighbour, at my bedroom door, just after my Mom had told me my Dad was dead - I was thirteen years old, mind you, right in the middle of puberty - spoke of the look of horror on my Dad’s dead face as he was carted down the stairs to the Ambulance. My Mom added to this image years later, telling me that not only did my Dad die in horror, he was saying to some invisible force in the corner of the room, “Not you! Why are you here?! Oh no! No, no, no!”
Then he died.
Still, life goes on. Somehow.
#
We waited inside as long as we could, but eventually the venue security threw us out. It had done no good. Typical.
In the nearly empty carpark - even the band had left, and only the most hardy of Roadies were loading the last of the trucks to move onto the next place and almost as soon as arriving would start to unload the lot again - there stood a handful of goons. It didn't take much working out to realise these were the group that contained those sicko’s who violated our girls. At that moment, and every moment after to the best of my recollection, we became their Big Brothers. It was on.
#
The older looking one, the one who had touched Corakayla, really had something in for Freddie. Fed by his cohorts, he broke a glass bottle on a low brick wall and threatened Freddie with it. Then the short-arse one who touched Loffie stood up. He was mine. Instead of running away, or hiding, or something equally as weedy, the decisive action was taken.
Bolstered by the others, and some hangers on waiting for their taxi’s, me and Freddie, we both advanced on them, with the, “Come on then!” phraseology echoing before us, calling their bluff. They tried to stand firm. They tried to hold our stare, our determined, unstoppable stare, but seeing the intimidation tactic wasn’t having the desired effect, the tall guy threw the bottle at Freddie hard and missed, by a country mile. They were only left with the option of running away, like the bitches they were.
And that pretty much ended that. We never saw them at any further venues after that. Chickens.
Well, it has to be said that I’ve dealt with idiots like this all my life, like the one I mentioned earlier, the lunatic at the gig. That’s why I mentioned him! Linear time issue again. You know, I have a tendency to bump into these kinds of people. I don’t know if it says more about me, or more about them?
Ah, but Freddie? Good kid. He was supposed to die this night, incidentally. And this is where he was supposed to have died. Glassed in the face and neck. He bled out before the Ambulance arrived. Poor Freddie.
Now, it’s all changed. And in another world, I lost my head.
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