Peter Guttridge - The Last King of Brighton

He looked up at a footbridge that crossed the road. Cows were walking in procession across it, silhouetted against the blue sky.

‘Wow, look at that,’ Dan said, laughing. ‘Surreal.’

‘That’s why I don’t want a convertible,’ Billy said, scrunching down in his seat. ‘One of them falls on you, you’re screwed.’

Dan gave him a look.

‘What? You think a cow is going to fall on you?’

They all sniggered.

‘Not just a cow,’ Billy said.

‘You mean a cow and something else? A giraffe maybe?’

‘I didn’t mean that-’

Hathaway laughed along but tuned out. Thinking about his dark places.

After the gig – which represented the first outing for Bill’s newly bought sitar – they sat around over a drink and Hathaway realized how distant he and Charlie now were from the other group members. Bill and Dan, in particular, were getting even deeper into music. Alan, the drug-dealing roadie, sat quietly, a reminder to Hathaway of the way the group straddled his two lives.

‘Folk music is really taking off,’ Billy was saying.

‘Folk music?’ Charlie said, incredulous. He pointed at his hair. ‘Bad enough I’m looking like a Liverpool pooftah. Now you want me to turn into Peter, Paul and bloody Mary?’

‘Actually, it’s worse than that,’ Dan said, laughing. ‘These folk groups don’t even have drummers.’

Everybody laughed but Charlie looked thunderous.

‘What – you’re trying to dump me?’

‘No!’ Billy said. ‘But we’ve got to look at what’s going on. Dylan. Simon and Garfunkel. Their new album is beautiful. There’s a couple of songs we could cover-’

‘Beautiful?’ Charlie snorted. ‘Since when was rock music beautiful? We get people dancing; we don’t do beautiful.’

‘Beautiful gets the girls,’ Dan said.

‘I don’t have any problem getting the girls,’ Charlie said.

Hathaway glanced at him.

‘We’ve got to move with the times,’ he said after a beat.

‘Which are a’changing,’ Dan and Billy said together, then laughed.

‘Sound of Silence’ came up on the jukebox.

‘I love this Simon and Garfunkel song,’ Billy said.

Charlie scowled.

‘I don’t like any of that sentence.’

‘No, really. This is a great, great track. We could do three or four songs from the new album. “I Am A Rock”-’

‘No way am I doing Simon and Garfunkel,’ Charlie said, fishing out a packet of cigarettes from his pocket.

‘We need to be writing our own stuff like Paul Simon does,’ Dan said. ‘That’s where the money is.’

‘So who’s our writer?’ Hathaway said. ‘Cos it isn’t me.’

‘I’ve been working on a couple of things,’ Billy said. ‘Wondered if we might give them a try.’

They all reared back in their seats to look at him.

‘Dark horse,’ Charlie said.

‘Crazy horse,’ Hathaway said.

Hathaway met Charlie by chance in a new club in the Laines a couple of days later. Charlie had definitely started feeling his oats. The drugs were making him even more aggressive. Charlie was with a new girlfriend called Laura. Hathaway was in a booth with a girl from the pier. It was busy but there was one stool free at the bar. As Laura started to sit on it, her miniskirt riding high, the man at the next stool looked down at her thighs.

‘Seat’s taken,’ he said, continuing to look at her legs.

Charlie hauled him off his stool.

‘Yours is free, though, right?’ he said before he left him sprawling on the ground.

The man looked up at Charlie.

‘Piss off out of here,’ Charlie said.

‘I’ll be right back,’ Hathaway said. He made sure Charlie could see him approach in the mirror behind the bar.

‘Happy as Larry, boys and girls?’

Laura was staring straight ahead and Charlie had both hands round his beer glass. His pupils were enormous.

‘Johnny boy, what a delightful surprise.’

Hathaway caught the barman’s eye. The barman hadn’t intervened but he was looking sour. Hathaway could see he was wondering whether to call the police. He palmed a tenner and slid it across the bar. The barman took it, nodded and moved away.

‘Dad wants us to get into pop management,’ Hathaway said. ‘Reckons there’s big money there.’

‘Whatever,’ Charlie said, staring at his reflection in the mirror.

Hathaway did a drum roll on the bar.

‘Great.’

Charlie took to managing groups like he’d been born for it. He signed up about two dozen local groups straight off. Brought an edge to his management work. Dangled a big London wheeler-dealer out of a fourth-floor window by his feet when he tried to steal one of his acts. He stubbed a lighted cigar into the forehead of another rival.

‘Fuck, Charlie,’ Hathaway said.

‘People I scare are going to have to look over their shoulders for the rest of their lives,’ Charlie said.

Dennis Hathaway was impressed. At the end of the pier he reminisced.

‘There’s this one guy I know. He was born in Manchester back in 1926. His dad made raincoats. Age fourteen, in the war, he sang in his local synagogue and tried doing a comedy turn. He was rubbish. Sat out the war – mysterious illness that kept him in hospital until the day the war ended, then miraculous recovery – and then became an impressionist – Jimmy Cagney and all that. He actually did the London Palladium. Max Miller said he stank. Maybe he realized it. Anyway, he turned to management, promotions. Worked out of his local phone box.

‘We’ve had dealings with him. Has his Rolls Royce and his flash jewellery. Manages the Small Faces. Pays off Radio Caroline to play the music from his acts. Pays the Small Faces a salary and gives them a London house, a Jag and driver, and all the clothes they want. No real money, though.’

He looked at Charlie.

‘So far as I’m aware he doesn’t commit arson, though.’

Charlie looked levelly back from behind his sunglasses. Hathaway frowned.

‘Arson?’

‘As I understand it, when a certain record company didn’t want to release one of Charlie’s new groups from its existing contract, its office was burned down.’

‘All I know,’ Charlie drawled, ‘is that the group was released from its contract two days later.’

‘And the accountant?’ Reilly said.

Charlie held out his hands, palms up.

‘I wanted to make sure he never had a child. So I got my tools out and battered his penis. I could have battered his head but I didn’t. I just wanted our fucking money.’

‘What?’ Hathaway said, both repelled and fascinated.

‘Charlie here was using an accountant he thought had cheated us,’ Reilly said. ‘He grabbed him at home, took him somewhere – not sure where, Charlie – and went to work on him.’

Dennis Hathaway was watching Charlie with a mixture of fascination and respect. Hathaway’s main emotion was fear.

‘ Since when did you join the Grenadier fucking Guards?’

Dennis Hathaway was in his shirt sleeves on the boat. He peered at his son’s red Victorian uniform, then at the medals on his son’s breast.

‘And it looks like you’ve had a busy war.’

‘I got it in Carnaby Street,’ Hathaway said.

‘The medals? Fighting tourists?’

‘The whole thing.’

Hathaway and Charlie had gone up to Carnaby Street in the summer sunshine. They smoked dope on the train. They wandered London in a daze – dazed by the cannabis, dazed by the life there. Carnaby Street was buzzing, ‘Sergeant Pepper’ pumping out of every shop, incense and marijuana in the air, the pavements crowded with dolly birds and hipsters.