Close on five, Nathan the Nazi, our imperious Musical Director, pulls the plug on the band’s second rehearsal. True to form, he tries to snare Candy the vocalist into a quick drink but she isn’t giving him the time of day. Me and the drummer Cash make a space before it starts getting weird. Crackling through the smoke and fallen leaves, his shuffling beats are still ringing in my ears.
It’ll be so good to get out of Liverpool for a bit, if I can hold it all together – even if it’s only going to be six weeks round a bunch of U.S. bases – a month in Germany then up to Scotland, partying with the B-boys & the jocks on the Holy Loch. And it’s good to be playing with Cash again after some of the wooden soldiers I’ve had to put up with of late. There’s nothing’s worse than trying to make sense of time with a bad drummer making you sound like an even worse bass player.
‘Yer man Nathan’s somethin’ else ‘dere, la,’ says Cash, grinning up at the glowing sky.
‘He may be a few buckets short of a river, but yeah, he’s a demon on the old Joanna,’ I say. ‘Didn’t look like he impressed Candy much, though.’
‘Candy’s niiice, boy. Sweet little voice too,’ he laughs.’ You think she got time fer a little drummer boy?’
‘Why not? Go for it, mate. May the Bluebird of happiness shit on your head. She’s too...I dunno. She’s too... something or other for me.’
‘She’s straight, Candy, is all. Like... real, y’know what I’m sayin’? You only check f’ the crazy ones, kidder.’
‘Bullshit!’
Cash stops to sort a shoelace & I turn round to wait for him, the sun dying into the Mersey through bruised orange clouds.
‘Is right! Y’don’ recall the lady they call Crystal Jane?’
‘Piss off! She’s somebody else’s problem now, mate.’
Truth is she’ll be one of my problems until I kick it - until I’m a howling pub singer in the Choir Invisible. And I don’t know if I can stand another summer playing Soul standards to some wasted Yank submarine crew that still think they’ve got God on their side. I really don’t know if I can. Fair enough, on a good night the tunes still open up sparkling veins of gold in your memory. You get carried away - yesterday’s gone & yesterday’s here. You believe in miracles, you believe there’s a ghetto heaven: this girl, that girl; nights of the stolen cars; keepin’ on movin’ with Soul to Soul all those years ago... the smell of Northern Star, sex, the pyramids and the dustbin lids... thinking you were a soul boy - a little bit lucky, a little bit hard. Trying to get Crystal to come round; knowing she liked you, knowing she was going to ditch that sleaze with the mother of pearl cell-phone & the souped-up Cortina. Knowing she was going to mark your cards.
All this noise, mate – music - it’s all about time, it happens in time. But these days I don’t feel like I’ve got any. I can groove like a JB All-Star, but I just don’t seem to have any time.
But it’s Cash I want to tell you about. My time-keeper beating out the hours and the seconds in too-wise asides. Now he’s off to another of his percussion workshops for reformed smack heads and trainee social workers wanting to water their primal roots, to juice up their dry white bones. And Candy’s so white, I can see her falling for him big time. I can see her eyes widening as he shows her round the Frontline: ‘Strictly ganja, seen?’ scrawled on the side of red-brick two-up two-down; all the Yardies bussing in from J.A. with their freak houses and shantytown eyes. Yeah, I can see Cash getting to haul her ashes.
When I first met him at some old blues party behind the Caribbean centre, Cash had just locked in with this old Rasta that had a second-hand furniture store on Granby Street; some dead-toothed old scavenger with a scarred face and dreads wound under a knitted tam. After the riots, Cash helped him drag anything that wasn’t ash and cinders out of the gutted old houses on The Avenue where charred roof-beams speared the sky. The old fella used to blast his head with chillums of sacramental indecency and they’d sit there while time ate itself, waiting for someone, anyone, to scuffle their empire of dust. Cash got to hear all about Soloman, Sheba, the Kebra Nagest, The Song of Songs; a perfect Africa of the mind: ‘Look not upon me because I am black… I am the rose of Sharon and the Lily of the valleys…’
We fell out of touch for a while. I got a gig with some planet-eyed chart band chasing their second hit, snorted up the last thirty seconds of my fifteen minutes of fame on a tour bus roaring through the Ardeche.
Cash’s sweet redemption songs were all crushed lullabies by the time I started running into him again. By then he was checking more for Delroy and Jamal his older brothers with their money-thrumming engines and their little, jewelled-up Gangsta conceits. He’d shut-off the gold ghost whisper of Burning Spear, retired from the rag-and bone trade. He’d got a taste for the cold bliss of free-base smoking through his veins - wanted everything coloured gun-metal and chrome. But it was the old fella that had taught him to play the drums, pounding out the Nyabingi on sticks of broken furniture. That he still hasn’t lost. The Time. Whatever the fuck he may’ve lost along the way, Cash has still got the time.
Then one time out of our time, he told me this mad little story.
Mid-nineties, the old fella’s junk shop had been boarded up since the turn of the decade. He’d died or fucked off, Cash didn’t even know. But about 3 a.m. some Saturday Cash and his brothers piled out of the BMW on Granby after an averagely fruitful style and violence binge. As the expensive combustion of the engine and the pounding hip-hop died, Cash said he thought he heard soft drumming coming from behind the corrugated sheets battened across the front of the old shop. He was pretty strung out by then, had stopped playing even. Every half-heard beat was just an accompaniment to an imprecise music of loss. Any pain he couldn’t shoulder like Delroy’s AK-47 he’d vaporise in the white glaze of the crack pipe.
Anyways, that night he dreams he’s wandering the barren shore of baked black earth by the waters of the Nile. Out on the river, he saw the old fella steering a barque in to the reeds growing along the bank, a shrouded figure hunched beside him at the prow. As Cash raised an arm to shade his eyes from the impossible sun, a beautiful girl with ebony skin stood and shrugged off the dusty shroud. Naked, she stepped out of the vessel & waded through the reeds towards where Cash stood transfixed on the bank. A necklace of beads, cowries shells & precious stones glistened between her blue-black breasts (Why don’t I have dreams like this? I was thinking. Why do I dream about leprous witches in fat-suits playing pink guitars?). The girl walks straight up to him, unsmiling & hands him some ornate golden ring.
When he woke up, Cash said, he knew that he had to go back to the old man’s shop one last time.
‘I tell ya, kidder, when I walked into the place again I felt like I was in a film, y’know. I was livin’ large, bwai, spooked out by that dream. I was sure the old fella must’ve left me something ‘dere. Somethin’ that was going to change my life, you know what I’m sayin’?’ As he was telling me this Cash reached into the pocket of his old flying jacket.
‘You wanna see what he left me, Star?’
With a theatrical flourish and a malevolent grin, he held his clenched fist before me & widened his eyes.
‘Go on,’ I said.
He opened his fist with a snort & there was nothing there but fluff & dust & the broad carved lines on his palm.
We stop to go our separate ways where Catharine street breaks out into the twin boulevards of the Avenue. Cash tries to lay one of his convoluted street-hip handshakes on me.
‘Can’t do that one, sunshine. I’m a Mason.’ I say slapping him on the shoulder. ‘Would this be a bad time to ask you to sort us an eighth on tick, Cash mate?’ I add, slipping out like its an after-thought (It isn’t).
He looks at me wearily. I’m waiting for a one liner. A glib put-down. Maybe another pertinent address on the psychology of time. But he carries on just looking at me & I start to feel a little uncomfortable. The headlights of the rush hour traffic are a conveyor belt of diamonds passing behind his head.
‘What, man?’ I say, ‘What are you looking at me like that for?’
‘I worry about you, Spa, y’know. Watch y’self.’
X-ray eyes.
‘I’m alright.’ I grin with embarrassment – then glow with pleasure that we have something further in common: we’re both worried about me.
‘I’m just having a bit of a weird time, mate. I’ll be alright once we get off on the tour.’ I say, ‘But thanks for worrying, Cash mate. I appreciate it.’
‘Serious, Spa. These strange times we livin’ through, y’know.’
Here it comes.
I flash back on the last time Me & Cash were standing together on this corner. Not so long ago, six months maybe. When dinosaurs walked the earth. Behind us the Greek orthodox church was in flames - great billows of black smoke, icons, a toxic cross.
Times were always strange.
‘Really Cash, mate. I’m alright.’ I smile & take his
hand, ‘I know a man who isn’t though.’
I’m thinking of Dingo Hale, the way notes used to pour out of his sax
like Coltrane’s rain. Now he’s fluoxetined t’ fuck, a Glaxo-Kline
ghost, another blaze-guttered building.
‘Seen. I know a few me’self.’ Cash gazes off down the Avenue.
We stand there nodding for a few moments as the sky deepens into velvet blue.
‘When things change so much so quick it can get serious, yeah? Sometimes y’have t’get away, y’know what I’m sayin’? Y’have t’disappear from view.’ He squints off behind me like he’s looking for something in the jewel lights & the mist of exhaust fumes in the chill air. ‘It’s like I always think how a few years back I had to change the way I play, y’know? I had to change the way I hold the sticks.’ He laughs, ‘’Cause, y’know, I was brought to hold ‘em like the busies hold their truncheons - rock grip, y’get me? But I had to get with the real jazz grip, y’know, like Art Blakey ‘n’ alla dem.’ He demonstrates the loose wrist action with an imaginary stick in each hand like he’s trying and failing to eat Chinese food.
‘ An’ what I’m gettin’ at, Spa, is that ‘till I got the jazz grip sorted, I couldn’t fuckin’ play at all. Not wit’ anyone else, anyways, ‘cause I wasn’t one ‘ting nor the other, y’get me. For time dere I was a changeling dat hadn’t changed.’
I carry on nodding like some dumb toy animal suspended over the dash-board
of a stolen car. I think about his slick river chick with the band of gold
- then that time I asked Crystal to marry me half-kidding, half serious as
death. She’d known I didn’t have the courage of my convictions.
She’d stuck out her tongue, slipped a Pepsi ring-pull on my finger and
slung the empty can onto the wasteland in front of the cathedral.
‘I know what you mean... life an’ that…. yeah…still
working on it, mate...’ I’m not saying what I mean. I’m
thrown by the simple genius of his parable. I’m trying to respond in
his terms, trying not to fuck it up. But it is fucked up. It is. I am. Time
is.
Just then a Sten-gun exhausted Granby death kettle rips past & a jar-headed little ghetto child yells something murderous & indecipherable out the window.
Cash looks at me with his warm, bright eyes & his grin widens. ‘Call
roun’ later, Star. I’ll sort yer out. I got some proper smokin’
Double Zero!’ He high fives me & I stop his fist in my open palm.
‘So how long did it take to perfect your jazz grip, Cash?’ I need
to know. I think I need to know. I need to know before I really lose it and
end up blowing the gig.
He just smiles & mimes a seven stroke roll across the rack-toms. A taxi roars between us as he crosses to the central reservation.
I’m can barely hear him as he turns to shout, ‘Time, spa! Time.’