Chapter 19

While Jess called everyone she knew to find out where this guy Chas was at, I was leaning on the wall, looking through the wire at the city, and trying to figure out what I'd listen to at that exact moment, if I owned an iPod or a Discman. The first thing that came to mind was Jonathan Richman's 'Abominable Snowman in the Market', maybe because it was sweet and silly, and reminded me of a time in life when I could afford to be that way. And then I started humming the Cure's 'In Between Days', which made a little more sense. It wasn't today and it wasn't tomorrow, and it wasn't last year and it wasn't next year, and anyway the whole roof thing was an in-between kind of a limbo, seeing as we hadn't yet made up our minds where our immortal souls were headed.

Jess spent ten minutes talking to sources close to Chas and came back with a best guess that he was at a party in Shoreditch. We walked down fifteen flights of stairs, through the thud of dub and the stink of piss, and then emerged back on to the street, where we stood shivering in the cold while waiting for a black cab to show. Nobody said much, besides Jess, who talked enough for all of us. She told us whose party it was, and who would probably be there.

'It will be all Tessa and that lot.'

'Ah,' said Martin. 'That lot.'

'And Alfie and Tabitha and the posse who go down Ocean on Saturdays. And Acid-Head Pete and the rest of the whole graphic design crew.'

Martin groaned; Maureen looked seasick.

A young African guy driving a shitty old Ford pulled up alongside us. He wound down the passenger window and leaned over.

'Where you wanna go?'

'Shoreditch.'

'Thirty pounds.'

'Fuck off,' said Jess.

'Shut up,' said Martin, and got in the front seat. 'My treat,' he said.

The rest of us got in the back.

'Happy New Year,' said the driver.

None of us said anything.

'Party?' said the driver.

'Do you know Acid-Head Pete at all?' Martin asked him. 'Well, we're hoping to run into him. Should be jolly.'

'"Jolly", 'Jess snorted. 'Why are you such a tosser?' If you were going to joke around with Jess, and use words ironically, then you'd have to give her plenty of advance warning.

It was maybe four-thirty in the morning by now, but there were tons of people around, in cars and cabs and on foot. Everyone seemed to be in a group. Sometimes people waved to us; Jess always waved back.

'How about you?' Jess said to the driver. 'You working all night? Or are you gonna go and have a few somewhere?'

'Work toute la nuit,' said the driver. 'All the night.'

'Bad luck,' said Jess.

The driver laughed mirthlessly.

'Yes. Bad luck.'

'Does your missus mind?'

'Sorry?'

'Your missus. La femme. Does she care? About you working all night?'

'No, she don't care. Not now. Not in the place where is she.'

Anyone with an emotional antenna could have felt the mood in the cab turn real dark. Anyone with any life experience could have figured out that this was a man with a story, and that this story, whatever it was, was unlikely to get us into the party mood. Anyone with any sense would have stopped right there.

'Oh,' said Jess. 'Bad woman, eh?'

I winced, and I'm sure the others did, too. Bigmouth strikes again.

'Not bad. Dead.' He said this flat, like he was just correcting her on a point of fact - as if in his line of work, 'bad' and 'dead' were two addresses that people got confused.

'Oh.'

'Yes. Bad men kill her. Kill her, kill her mother, kill her father.'

'Oh.'

'Yes. In my country.'

'Right.'

And right there was the place Jess chose to stop: exactly at the point where her silence would show her up. So we drove on, thinking our thoughts. And I would bet a million bucks that our thoughts all contained, somewhere in their tangle and swirl, a version of the same questions: Why hadn't we seen him up there? Or had he been up and come down, like us? Would he sneer, if we told him our troubles? How come he turned out to be so fucking… dogged?

When we got to where we were going, Martin gave him a very large tip, and he was pleased and grateful, and called us his friends. We would have liked to be his friends, but he probably wouldn't have cared for us much if he got to know us.

Maureen didn't want to come in with us, but we led her through the door and up the stairs into a room that was the closest thing I've seen to a New York loft since I've been here. It would have cost a fortune in NYC, which means it would have cost a fortune plus another thirty per cent in London. It was still packed, even at four in the morning, and it was full of my least favorite people: fucking art students. I mean, Jess had already warned us, but it still came as a shock. All those woolly hats, and moustaches with parts of them missing, all those new tattoos and plastic shoes… I mean, I'm a liberal guy, and I didn't want Bush to bomb Iraq, and I like a toke as much as the next guy, but these people still fill my heart with fear and loathing, mostly because I know they wouldn't have liked my band. When we played a college town, and we walked out in front of a crowd like this, I knew we were going to have a hard time. They don't like real music, these people. They don't like the Ramones or the Temptations or the 'Mats; they like D J Bleepy and his stupid fucking bleeps. Or else they all pretend that they're fucking gangstas, and listen to hip-hop about hos and guns.

So I was in a bad mood from the get-go. I was worried that I was going to get into a fight, and I'd even decided what that fight would be about: I'd be defending either Martin or Maureen from the sneers of some motherfucker with a goatee, or some woman with a moustache. But it never happened. The weird thing was that Martin in his suit and his fake tan, and Maureen in her raincoat and sensible shoes, they somehow blended right in. They looked so straight that they looked, you know, out there. Martin and his TV hair could have been in Kraftwerk, and Maureen could have been like a real weird version of Mo Tucker from the Velvet Underground. Me, I was wearing a pair of faded black pants, a leather jacket and an old Gitanes T-shirt, and I felt like a fucking freak.

There was only one incident that made me think I might have to break someone's nose. Martin was standing there drinking wine straight out of a bottle, and these two guys started staring at him.

'Martin Sharp! You know, off of breakfast telly!'

I winced. I have never really hung out with a celebrity, and it hadn't occurred to me that walking into a party with Martin's face is like walking into a party naked: even arts students tend to take notice. But this was more complicated than straightforward recognition.

'Oh, yeah! Good call!' his buddy said.

'Oi, Sharpy!'

Martin smiled at them pleasantly.

'People must say that to you all the time,' one of them said.

'What?'

'You know. Oi, Sharpy and all that.'

'Well, yes,' said Martin. 'They do.'

'Bad luck, though. Of all the people on TV, you end up looking like that cunt.'

Martin gave them a cheerful, what-can-you-do shrug and turned back to me.

'You OK?'

'That's life,' he said, and looked at me. He'd somehow managed to give an old cliche new depth.

Maureen, meanwhile, was plainly petrified. She jumped every time anyone laughed, or swore, or broke something; she stared at the party-goers as if she were looking at Diane Arbus photos projected fifty feet wide on an Imax screen.

'You want a drink?'

'Where's Jess?'

'Looking for Chas.'

'And then can we go?'

'Sure.'

'Good. I'm not enjoying myself here.'

'Me neither.'

'Where do you think we'll go next?'

'I don't know.'

'But we'll all go together, do you think?'

'I guess. That's the deal, right? Until we find this guy.'

'I hope we don't find him,' said Maureen. 'Not for a while. I'd like a sherry, please, if you can find one.'

'You know what? I'm not sure there's going to be too much sherry around. These guys don't look like sherry-drinkers to me.'

'White wine? Would they have that?'

I found a couple paper cups, and a bottle with something left in it.

'Cheers.'

'Cheers.'

'Every New Year's the same, huh?'

'How do you mean?'

'You know. Warm white wine, a bad party full of jerks. And this year I'd promised myself things would be different.'

'Where were you this time last year?'

'I was at a party at home. With Lizzie, my ex.'

'Nice?'

'It was OK, yeah. You?'

'I was at home. With Matty.'

'Right. And did you think, a year ago...'

'Yes,' she said quickly. 'Oh, yes.'

'Right.' And I didn't really know how to follow up, so we sipped our drinks and watched the jerks.