I
‘Can I borrow your phone for a minute mate? My battery’s dead.’ asked one eye this way and one eye that, dressed like an extra out of a 2 Tone band from the eighties; his grey, ironed trousers sitting on a bony waist, side parting hair dipping out from beneath a chequered flat cap and a warm, proper London accent you’d be both suspicious and loveable towards.
‘As long as there’s no rushing off, though you’ve been in this queue for a good ten minutes, so I doubt that’d happen, unless you’re really after a new phone or just don’t care about shitting your pants.’ replied Jack, leaning against a wall, in his own sweaty world until the question, feeling a lot more trustworthy than normal on account of the past hour and a half of dance music he’d just raved to.
‘Dad, it’s Charlie. I’m in a bit of a situation here. I got split up from Moog in the crowd and my battery’s dead. What I need you to do is look in the phone book for Moog. Give him a call and tell him I’m at the toilets where we were earlier. If he doesn’t show up, I’ll just go back to the flat. Cheers Dad.’ instructed Charlie with a tone that said everything about his relationship with his Dad come mate, old school practice of keeping paper records of electronic data and commitment to leaving with the person he arrived with.
By this point it was finally Jack’s turn to use a cubicle. He’d favoured the shelter of an inside toilet as opposed to the racks of halve pipes outside, where people had to stand face to face, an inch away from touching each other with their private parts. He did one day festivals for sounds, not splashings.
‘That’s a good effort. I hope you find your friend. Take care.’ said Jack, taking the phone from a smiley, appreciative Charlie.
‘If he rings back and I’m still here, can you give me a shout?’ asked the cockney, 25 at most and clearly nearing the end of his night that by the sight of him, included a lot of dancing in mud, twisting of his preppy clothes and consuming beer, amongst other things.
‘Sure.’ said Jack, taking to a cubicle.
After he’d taken his emergency toilet roll from his back pocket, wiped the toilet seat a good two times, undone his baggy jeans and sat, the lights went out. Sighs bounced between the walls of cubicles, the lights flickered back on before being cut again, everyone sighed some more and so repeated Jack’s call of nature.
It’d been a long wait and a demanding day on Jack’s legs. With that in mind, he took his phone out, sent a few messages and used the solitude of his surroundings to be what a stuck up spa would call relaxation quarters. When the phone buzzed in Jack’s hand and Luke’s face flashed on its screen, Jack pinged out of his daydream and rushed back to the main arena.
II
‘I can’t believe we found each other after you charged away to the front. What a great gig though. Who’d have thought they’d still be doing this so many years on.’ said Jack to Luke as they waited for their train to London Paddington.
‘I can’t believe how long you were in that toilet for. You must have been in a pretty messy state. Still, it looks like we’ve beaten the crowds. Beats me why they’d stay for that last band. They’re certainly not headliner material.’ replied Luke.
After exchanging a few comments about the set of their favourite DJ collective that they’d been counting down to all summer, conversation didn’t dry up so much as take a subdued simmer towards a state of peaceful satisfaction. The two friends had jumped around in excitement on the train up, ripped every other band of the day apart, hanged off each other’s necks in celebration of their near idols arriving on stage and spent four hours in the near dark, circling the festival site, trying to find the right exit.
‘Charlie!’ shouted the usually more reserved Jack.
‘What’s going on? Who’s Charlie?’ asked Luke, opening his eyes from an intense ten minutes of gig recollection and random thoughts such as ‘Are you really inside if there’s a window open?’ and ‘How do those one legged, foldable festival seats hold you up?’
‘It’s that guy we met earlier’ replied Jack, standing up from his seat, squeezing past the knees of Luke and walking with a pace of intent down the carriage isle to the far end where sat a silent group of friends face to face on tabled seating, designed perfectly for co-travellers and horrifically for any solo commute.
‘Can I help you mate?’ asked one of the guys in the group, raising an eyebrow that tucked in under his dark brown cap.
‘Great to see you mate! Did you get a charge?’ inquired Jack.
‘I’m not sure it’ll ever come to that mate. We’ll see I guess… So your final stop’s London? We’re going for some drinks in our local. Care to join?’
By this point, Luke, not recalling having met anyone at the festival, had caught up with Jack, curious as to what his friend was up to, seated with a bunch of trendy strangers, talking as though they were all best friends. Jack had always been more of a gaze out of the window type of guy, quick to implode with passive aggression any time someone as much as walked passed or caught eyes with him.
‘Hi there. Sorry about this. Come on Jack, let’s sit back there and leave these guys to it. We’re almost home.’ replied Luke.
‘It’s okay mate. It’s not a problem with us. You should both come along for a drink. We’re not going much further than Paddington.’ replied the capped stranger.
III
One short stop in Slough, a shared Taxi through Paddington and a skip past Baker Street, the group of friends, Jack and Luke arrived at a pub nearby Great Portland Street tube station. It’d been an unbalanced journey of much silence, left field interjections of conversation from Jack, exercises in damage control by Luke and a textbook cabbie tale.
‘What’s everyone having?’ asked the capped man in the group of strangers. Luke and Jack moved to one side and positioned themselves to buy their own beverages. They’d learned the pitfalls of other people’s generosity on several previous occasions.
‘They seem like a nice bunch.’ suggested Jack.
‘Sure. The drive was pretty strange though. They’re not saying much to each other. Ten minutes in and I was welcoming you putting your foot in it about the tragedy of wearing caps and growing beards.’ replied Luke.
No sooner had everyone been served a drink, the landlord turned towards a dusty, seven tier system of CD trays and buttons, rotated a nozzle and filled the near empty, sorry looking residential road pub with music. The group of friends from the train immediately recognised the song.
‘Are you having a laugh? Time and a place mate. You do know what happened this afternoon?’ asked one of the strangers, dressed in a singlet and revealing two drum sticks in his back pocket as he leaned in towards the landlord over the bar.
No questions were asked but the nozzle was rotated back to where it pointed. The party looked at unease with one another, the landlord consulted his phone’s messages to work out what the guy had meant and Luke ushered Jack to one side.
‘I haven’t seen familiarity between a boozer and landlord like that for years. It’s all ‘help me fund my degree in model village architecture by pouring you shit pints’ these days’ observed Luke, drifting into a head spin about life as an overseas student come flyer pusher by night in London.
IV
By 2 AM, the group of strangers Jack and Luke had arrived with had splintered off to different corners of the pub. The cap-wearing centrepiece had been in deep conversation with the landlord who took him behind the bar and into the back quarters.
Jack had gradually become less scattered in his talking, Luke was less distant in thought and by unnoticeable dribs and drabs, punters were floating in like puzzle pieces on an auntie’s table that never seem to be moving or building towards something until the picture’s suddenly right there.
‘I’ve got to get my hands on some of the tracks the guys played tonight. When it went dark and they came back out to that really nasty beat, I literally went weak at the knees. I became that cliché!’ said Jack excitedly.
‘You literally did. We literally lived that set as much as this pub is literally a pub and our early exit home was literally an escape from a sure bet waste of time.’ replied Luke, speaking as the pair often did with a crossbreed of fact and sarcasm that usually cut short even the keenest of newcomers.
‘You mean Kudos and the Easy Rinse Formula?’ asked an energetic, high-pitched voice of disbelieve.
‘What?’ asked Luke back.
‘KERF! I couldn’t believe it when Harry just threw the guitar in Gary’s face like that. Sinead and me were waiting all day for their set. Never has my brother been so useful. We wouldn’t have found out about this place ourselves!’ said the girl, looking up at the wall of the dated pub as though it was Mecca.
Jack, who’d been starring at his thighs, frowning in confusion, looked up at a lost Luke.
‘Did I get lost on my trail of thought in the toilet block and take a wrong turning at my formula for the best quantity of sliced cheese and tomato sauce in a toasted sandwich?’ he asked.
‘What?’ asked the girl back.
‘KERF! One of them wears a cap right?’ asked Jack.
‘Isn’t it great? He’s like a throwback to that mid nineties series about a 1950s policeman in the countryside. He’s so bold and ironic.’ claimed the girl, reaching for her empty glass that she marched extended by her arm towards the bar for a refill.
V
‘Four hours we walked around that festival site, to avoid those, no, these idiots, and four hours later, we’re in their bloody local with a legion of their devotional, quarter of their age groupies.’ figured Luke, looking at Jack with a headshake of disbelief.
‘So’ said the squeaky, irony-loving girl on her return from the bar. What are your names?’
As the girl moved her arm to hang around Luke’s neck, Luke moved his neck to escape, signalling with his eyes and a nod for Jack to follow him away from the table besides a fruit machine.
‘Just relax mate. I reckon this place will stay open for ages, being tucked away around here. Maybe the mighty KERF! will resurface so we can collect autographs!’ joked Jack.
The two friends had always shied away from the bands that took centre place on music magazine covers and entertainment shows on the television. For the past summer KERF! had not exploded into the mainstream, they’d arrived, blown a multinational’s marketing budget, ripped off a few seventies classics – adding a few layers of computer generated fuzz cultural commentators called ‘an innovation in composition’, and made an absolute fortune, so considered Jack and Luke.
‘O.M.G!’ screamed the girl. ‘It’s Gary! Look, it’s Gary!’
As the girl worked her way through a dictionary of abbreviations, panting heavily and fiddling in her ridiculously sized handbag, presumably for a phone to let everyone know what was happening, the rest of the pub stopped in their conversations, looked towards the door and watched to see what Gary would do.
‘Evening all. I’m not the sort to charge. Enjoy your night.’ announced Gary, moving slowly towards the bar where the landlord stood to pass over a drink that’d already been poured.
‘So, what is the score?’ asked Luke with a sense of surrender about his tone.
‘You don’t know? One song into their set, Harry and Gary exchanged whispers. Before you could chant the first line of ‘Everybody’s Special’, the arm of Harry’s bass guitar was bouncing off the cheek of Gary. Look, it’s still red!’ pointed the girl.
Luke looked around to find his friend who was nowhere to be seen. He stepped outside to search the smoking crowd but nothing. Next on the manhunt were the pub’s toilets, one urinal and one cubicle big. Jack wasn’t in there either, so up the stairs Luke walked, necking the last of his drink.
‘Luke, you know Harry, from the drive here. Pull up a chair. We’re talking about morning radio and how early you have to go on if they’re playing your exclusive’ said Jack, sitting with Harry and the rest of his band, minus Gary.
‘I thought Harry was the guy I met in the toilets earlier who wanted to charge his phone. When I asked about the charge on the train, he thought I meant getting his mate Gary arrested!’ explained Jack enthusiastically.
As Jack tried explaining the crossed wires to Luke, how he’d managed to get them stuck in a pub with a band they left the festival early to avoid, Harry and his group fidgeted and looked uneasy, clearly still feeling raw about the afternoon’s events.
‘Um… I’ve got chatting to that girl from downstairs. I’ll catch up with you in a bit. Let me know before you leave and we can share a cab home’ replied Luke.
Dismayed that his close friend was spending the aftermath of the big calendar event with a lead singer from a band they both despised, Luke moved back down the stairs and fetched another drink at the bar. Sure enough, the girl he’d reluctantly engaged with earlier was still around, by herself, on her phone, trying to chat to any passer by who’d make eye contact about the Harry and Gary incident.
‘She’s a good girl. A bit of hard work at first but her heart’s in the right place. Be gentle’ said Clive, moving slowly and confidently across the pub and passed Luke who’d sat himself on a bar stall.
‘Oh, we’re not…’ replied Luke.
‘Hi again babes!’ greeted the girl, slinging her arm around Luke’s neck.
‘That’s my brother. He works at KERF!’s label. He told me this is where they’d likely be hanging out after today’s non-gig. Let me go and find out if Harry and Gary have spoken yet. B.R.B!’
