Russell Hoban - Come Dance With Me

I felt tears rolling down my face and saw the young couple watching me and looking concerned. I tapped the headset and said, ‘The music.’ They nodded and smiled, feeling sorry for me. Their child would probably be a large boy with fair hair and blue eyes. All being well, he’d be almost ten now. I imagined him having a kickabout with his father, could hear the sound of the ball being kicked and their laughter. All being well.

OK, I’m back in the present now. One of the songs we’ll be doing tonight, ‘Birdshit on Your Statue’, was written by Jimmy Wicks soon after we came back from Vienna in 1988:

Up so high you used to be,

used to be, used to be —

Way too high for guys like me,

Used to be, oh used to be

Like a statue far above,

Much too high to ever love

Guys like me, you used to be.

But now I see, yes now I see,

Now I’m noticing that you’

V’got birdshit on your high statue,

What a shame, oh what a shame,

Is it pigeons we should blame?

Birdshit on your statue,

What a shame!

Jimmy’s tune for that song and his slide guitar were very snaky, quite vicious. ‘Did you have a particular statue in mind?’ I asked him.

‘Well, you know,’ he said, ‘if the birdshit fits …’

I just let that lie, I didn’t really want to get into it with him. He’s always wanted to move on me but while he and Tracy were together he couldn’t quite work himself up to it, and now that I’m with Elias he’s having difficulty handling it. He’s been seeing me so much from his point of view that he’s never read my total lack of interest in him other than as a colleague. Come to think of it, did I ever read Sid right and did he read me right? The world is full of emotional dyslexics.

Elias Newman, does he want to be a new man for himself and can he be it? And is he the right new man for me? I really wouldn’t mind not seeing him for a few days.

24 January 2003. The Mobile Mortuary concert didn’t start until eight o’clock, so it was already dark when I boarded the 295. This bus turns off Lillie Road into Fulham Palace Road on the way to the Hammersmith Apollo. It used to be the Hammersmith Odeon and is now the Carling Hammersmith Apollo. In the phone book it’s found under Carling, not Hammersmith. More and more things are under something they didn’t use to be under. Beer are the snows of yesteryear.

Once in Fulham Palace Road the 295 unrolled fewer and fewer English shop fronts and more and more multicultural ones. I know that xenophobia dare not speak its name in intellectual circles but I liked it better when the chippies outnumbered the halal. Proceeding grottywise past Charing Cross Hospital and whatever was opposite we arrived by lamplight at the Hammersmith Whatever. Why was I feeling so … negative? I’m not a negative sort of person.

Even at night the sky was light enough to show the black loom of the Hammersmith Flyover. It was on the right of an inverted triangle of sky, on the left of which stood the other-century red-brick angularity of College Court, complete with a witch’s hat atop its corner.

The forecourt was crowded with an interesting mix of people and a couple of ticket touts whose hyperactivity made them seem ten or more. As this was January, T-shirts were mostly covered by jackets and coats but the bits I saw intrigued me. VE WA was among a group of dangerous-looking men in biker’s leathers. T IN M appeared more than once in a patently middle-class cluster. There were young women and some not so young, all in black and sporting white faces, black lipstick, black eye makeup and long lank hair. There were young men in Transylvanian couture and a variety of gothic quiffs. In all of these categories there were some of a grandparent persuasion and the whole demographic aggregate milled about by lamplight, waiting for the doors to open. There was the usual crowd buzz but nothing very loud.

On the front of the Hammersmith Apollo, topped by quasi-Cecil B. DeMille general-purpose pillars, was a very horizontal marquee that opposed the verticality of College Court and (due to the laws of perspective) the Hammersmith Flyover. MACCABEE ENTERPRISES & D.O.A. RECORDS PRESENT MOBILE MORTUARY, widely said the front.

‘Who the fuck is Maccabee?’ said one of the dangerous-looking men to another.

‘Jews,’ said his colleague.

‘Not Scotch?’ said Dangerous No. I.

‘Maccabee,’ said No. 2, ‘as in four-by-twos.’

‘Not Scotch?’ said No. I.

‘Yids,’ said No. 2. ‘Non-skids.’

‘Fuck,’ said No. I. ‘That’s the fucking last time I vote Labour.’

‘I should fucking hope so,’ said No. 2. ‘Remind me to give you some literature. It’ll open your fucking eyes.’

At length the doors opened and we streamed in past the outer minders to the ticket takers in the lobby. There were several bars, a lot of darkness, two mirror-balls reflecting what light they could, and vendors selling T-shirts blazoned with the soles of two bare feet, with a tag that said MOBILE MORTUARY on the left big toe. Also displayed were miniature body drawers containing individual members of the band, decently shrouded up to the shoulders. There were posters in several designs, CDs and videos. Refreshments were available as well.

The miniature Christabel startled me; that I was intimate with a woman who was replicated in this way was unsettling. I looked around me, doing a memory rewind to check that I had come to this by steps that were impulsive but not incomprehensible; all of those steps had been taken because of my belief in a connection that was there before we met and that connection had brought me to the Hammersmith Apollo tonight.

Jackets were more open now and I noted a fair number that said NOT IN MY NAME and WAR IS NOT THE ANSWER. Also present, along with the dangerous men, were a substantial number of enthusiasts whose haircuts suggested that they thought war was the answer. The VE WA T-shirt I’d seen before now revealed itself as GIVE WAR A CHANCE. I was made aware, not for the first time, that I was not fully engaged with the world. Certainly I didn’t think war with Iraq was a good idea but I’d come here tonight to see and hear Mobile Mortuary and I wasn’t expecting David Dimbleby and a discussion on the international situation.

Looking up from where I stood I saw that the lobby was at the bottom of a kind of atrium at the top of which were several tiers of pinkness below the pink ceiling. The stairs on my left offered CIRCLE and LICENSED BAR. Before going up I asked one of the ticket takers if there was a support band.

‘Fathoms,’ he said.

‘Deep?’

‘No idea. Next!’

I went up the stairs, gave the licensed bar a miss, and went directly to my seat in the first row of the circle.

I had a good view of the stage where there was no action as yet. The only light was from some art deco ceiling fixtures. The audience murmured, coughed, and shifted in their seats for quite a long time. I had no one to murmur to until the middle-aged man on my left took off his jacket and revealed a T-shirt that said ANAPAESTS FOR PEACE. When he saw me reading it he smiled and said, ‘De-de-dum?’

‘I don’t think so,’ I said.

‘Iambic is the martial metre,’ he said: ‘“The king with half the East at heel is marched from lands of morning …”’

”’Beware the Jabberwock, my son\ The jaws that bite, the claws that catch! …”’ said the young man on my right, one of the dangerous types I had noticed earlier. He took off his leather jacket and aimed GIVE WAR A CHANCE at the anapaest man who shook his head but said nothing.