Chapter Twenty-Seven
Rick promised to take Theo out to lunch on the Friday, as a thank you for his dutiful work over the past week. They left the office at one pm on the dot and walked the short distance to Sweeney Todd's on Milsom Street. Sweeney's was an American-style burger place famous locally for its mini-skirted, roller-skating waitresses. They took a table by the window and Rick ordered a bottle of white wine.
Their waitress roller-skated away and came back a couple of minutes later with a bottle and two glasses on a tray held at shoulder level. She expertly placed the tray on the table, and off-loaded its contents onto the table. Theo stared blatantly at her legs as she did so and felt the blood rush to his groin. Adrianne yesterday and now this!
Rick asked if he could start a tab. Theo thought he was asking if it was okay to smoke and was about to reach for his Consulates when Rick took a small rectangle of plastic out of his wallet and gave it to the waitress. Of course! It was a credit card. Theo had never seen one in the flesh before, although he had seen the Access adverts on TV. He assumed a "tab" was something that enabled you to pay with the credit card. The waitress replied that this was fine and took the credit card and rolled away, both men watching as she went.
"Company credit card," said Rick. "I think we can get away with using it on this occasion. Not only is it your last day my friend, but Hughes has put a firm offer in on that place we showed him. So that's my monthly commission sorted."
"That's great news!" replied Theo.
"Yep. Pretty soon the company will be called Cabot Farr and Ingham, but keep that under your hat. And do you remember the rather fragrant Mrs Hannah?
"Yessss" replied Theo, unsure where this was going.
"Well she put an offer in too. Five grand below the asking but what the hell, it was optimistically priced anyway."
Theo beamed as Rick poured them both a glass of wine. "Hope you didn't mind me leaving you to fend for yourself but I thought you could use a baptism of fire."
"Oh, so there was no McDonald's viewing?"
"Nope, sorry. She said you were clumsy as fuck, but very sweet. And that you seemed to know what you were talking about."
Theo managed to ignore the first statement and let the final two wash over him. A grown-up thought he knew what he was talking about!
They both took sips from their wine. "Things could be looking up you know."
"Really? How do you mean?"
"The recession - it could be coming to an end." Theo didn't know that there had been a recession. He wasn't even sure if he knew what one was, but it sounded bad. "The past few years have been fairly tough - unemployment has gone through the roof, although Bath seems to have escaped the worst of it. We've noticed quite a few city types from London starting to buy second homes here, or moving down permanently to put their kids in the good schools here. And it's getting easier to get a mortgage these days. It could be a good time to be an estate agent."
Theo processed this information. He had enjoyed the past week, and if he had to have an office job, he couldn't imagine one that would suit him more. Maybe he'd have a chat with his parents about it, see what they thought.
By one thirty they had polished off the wine and Rick ordered another bottle. They each ordered a burger and fries at the same time, with Theo going for a banana milkshake as well.
The roller-skating waitresses fascinated and alarmed Theo in equal measure - he was terrified that they would clatter into one of the restaurant's many tables at any time or simply fall over as they ferried full trays of food and drink back and forth from the kitchen at the rear of the dining area. But he could not keep his eyes off their legs. He imagined Martine and Adrianne in one of these outfits, and then Laura. Then he wondered what time these girls finished work, and where they went afterwards. Would they change out of their mini-skirts?
"You know" Rick said, snapping Theo out of his reverie, "Bath is one of the best places in the world to live. It's true! There was a survey recently in The Sunday Times. Even though the council have done their best to fuck it up. Some of the buildings they allowed to go up in the seventies - Southgate, Snow Hill, The Hilton - shocking. Snow Hill I can understand because it's council housing so it's not gonna have Corinthian columns all over it but The Hilton? That's a multi-million dollar international company, and they were allowed to put up a fucking breeze block in the middle of a Georgian city. If you look down on Bath from any one of the famous seven hills, one of these monstrosities is gonna fuck up the view for you. The sack of Bath, I call it."
The mixture of white wine, burger, fries and banana milkshake had Theo's taste buds all over the place. He decided to settle them with a Consulate, the first time he'd smoked in front of Rick. Impressed with Theo's choice of cigarettes, Rick asked if he could have one. It felt good to be offering a cigarette to someone; usually it was him doing the cadging.
Rick continued "Bath used to be a city of hippies and artisans, now it's all stoke-brokers and hairdressers. Still, good for business I suppose." Not knowing what to say to this, Theo just nodded and watched the waitresses skate back and forth, back and forth. Rick ordered more wine, and eventually coffee. When they finished the coffee they thought better of going back to the office and ordered more wine.
Rick sparked up another ciggie and offered one to Theo, who accepted, his alcohol levels high enough to allow him to enjoy the proffered Marlboro without qualms. "So what's this band you're in then?" asked Rick as he blew out his match and placed it in the ashtray.
"Well, er, I'm not actually at the moment." Theo didn't quite feel that he could tell Rick that he was in the process of forming his own band. "I was in a rockabilly band called Steal Guitars, but they chucked - I mean sacked - me when their regular drummer got out of prison."
"Ha! A jailbird drummer eh? Sounds about right for a rockabilly band. Still, sorry to hear that."
"Yeah." Feeling buoyed by Rick's sympathy, he carried on: "I was a bit pissed off. Then I got into this punk band called X-Tradition - not 'extradition' with an E but X-tradition starting with an X..."
"Well that's not very clever. How would you find them in record shops? Would you look under E or X?"
"That's what I said!" agreed Theo. "Anyway, I didn't see eye to eye with the singer songwriter so we parted ways." Theo didn't want to go into the whole Dead White Sky thing again. "And now I'm, er..."
"Between bands?" offered Rick.
Theo had never heard this expression, but it made sense. "Yup."
"It happens, it happens."
Keen to move the conversation away from himself and on to a more comfortable subject, Theo asked about Rick's experience as lead singer of a rock 'n roll band, and how his dad had come to write songs for them:
"Well." He began, taking a long swig from his wine "It's a longish story I guess. There was so much going on in the seventies, music-wise..."
"You mean punk and that?" interjected Theo.
"No, not just punk, although I suppose that was part of it. All this current nonsense about punk reclaiming music for the masses is a load of nonsense by the way. The music scene pre-punk was filled with nothing but working class lads - Slade, T-Rex, Mott The Hoople, Bowie - all working class and proud of it. Anyway, there were lots of things going on, and it was a time when the division between the arts was getting blurred, so you'd have poetry at art shows and painting accompanied by live music and so on. I wanted to become an actor, but was also really into music as well, so I decided to combine them both and created this character Mr Marine. So I wrote loads of monologues and comedy skits and then I got a band together and set some of them to music. Sylvie was one of the backing singers and she suggested I tried using some of your dad's stuff as lyrics. Your dad had tried to get some of his poetry published in Agenda - fairly high-brow stuff it was, and very good - but he had nothing but rejection letters from them. So in a fit of pique he started to write the silliest, most trivial things he could think of. They were perfect for what we were doing.
Some were just daft and others quite fiercely anti-establishment. Funny considering what your dad does now."
"Can you remember what the poems or songs were about?"
"Some of them, yeah. He wrote this poem called 'Ode To A Dripping Tap', which we made into a prog rock epic, and then there was a song about the Morris Minor called' Go 'Lil Morris Go!' which was a bit like one of those American car songs of the sixties, but it featured two Morris Minors racing and the first one to hit thirty mph won. It took five minutes and happened in real time. Silly stuff really."
It gladdened Theo to think of his dad being so daft. "What was the band called?"
"The Serene Mr Marine Entertains." replied Rick. "Bloody stupid name for a band - way too long - but it was very much 'of the moment'. We weren't bad though. I could sing a bit, the rest of the band were tip-top musicians. All of them had been in pub bands since the sixties, plus there were three gorgeous girls on stage - your mum being one of them - usually wearing not much more than these girls roller skating up and down here." The image of his mum as one of these roller-skating waitresses momentarily derailed him.
Rick continued: "Yeah, we had a pretty big local following, and we even headlined an all-dayer at the Colston Hall in Bristol arranged by The Natural Theatre Company. Then I heard that Shaky was playing The Theatre Royal and that they were scouting around for a local support act. I contacted his manager and we went to meet him, me in my finest green velvet suit, along with the three girls, and he could not resist us! I played him a tape featuring our two most rock n roll songs and told him we'd be a perfect fit for Shaky."
"Was Shakin' Stevens cool then or something?"
"Er, well, cooler than he is now. Yeah, that whole teddy boy thing was big back then, and he'd just been playing Elvis in the West End. So yeah, he was pretty cool. But that gig was pretty much the beginning and the end for Mr Marine. We didn't have our own manager so I did all the negotiations with Shaky's guy. We agreed a set amount to be paid upon completion, but once our set was over he refused to pay the full amount, saying we were shambolic and not at all like the demo tape I'd played him when we met. Which was true to an extent. But I went off on one, and then he refused to pay us at all, and then the rest of the band got narky and it all kind of fell apart. We were serene no more." He stared into the middle distance. Or possibly at one of the waitresses. "The moral of the story I suppose, is make sure you get a good manager. And don't fuck with Shaky"
They eventually got back to Cabot Farr at ten past four. Rick had some urgent calls to make; otherwise they could have stayed in the restaurant, or gone on to a pub when opening time came round. Rick disappeared into his office, leaving Theo to sober up in the front shop. He made himself some coffee, without the aid of the coffee machine, which he still did not know how to use. He then excused himself saying that Rick had asked him to nip out and get the paper. He returned just before five with an Evening Chronicle rolled up under his arm. As he entered the shop, Rick was just leaving, cigarette in mouth, in the process of donning his jacket. "A-ha! There you are. Thought you'd left without saying goodbye for a moment. I've gotta run." He held out a hand and Theo shook it.
"Thanks for all your help Rick." Theo said.
"No problem young man. It was my pleasure. And if you ever want a job as an estate agent, give me a call. We could use a man like you."
"Thanks. I will."
"And say hi to Roger and the divine Sylvie for me."
"Will do." Theo watched as Rick disappeared across the Abbey churchyard, nodding at virtually everyone he passed.