Doctor Who_ Rags - Mick Lewis [36]
These merry boys and girls were the Amos Vale alcoholics, continually grasping for their bottles like purple-faced babies at feeding time. Heather and Nose were engaged in a conversation which neither of them understood, waxing more vehement and violent with each other as they failed to get their respective meaningless points across. Moggy groped for his red wine as if clawing at his last hopes of sanity, and succeeded only in spilling it which made him roar. Lionel cuffed him, hurling obscenities in a voice husky with throat cancer. Cliff scratched at a scab on his balding head, and fresh blood seeped down over his brow. He barely noticed it, staring like a rheumy fortune-teller into the depths of his bottle; it told him nothing he didn’t already know. ‘I said to her,’ he muttered, ‘told her I didn’t want to come back...
never come back, and you know what?... Never did. Never went...
back.’ His blonde hair stood up here and there on his scalp like weeds. His nose was a blistered bulb. Hedges stared at him with gory eyes but said nothing, his mouth working drool.
‘Never missed a day’s work,’ Moggy was boasting to no one.
‘When I was... when things were... better.’ He seemed oblivious to the blow the Neanderthal Lionel had dealt him. A foul squirting noise disturbed the relative peace of the upper cemetery as Moggy voided his bowels. Nobody objected. Nobody cared. He could sleep in it, like he always did. The purple haze of meths had long since stolen any sense of propriety. Visitors to the cemetery always avoided this dead-liver colony beneath the blind, stone angel.
This was an exclusive club; meths drinkers only need apply.
But now they had something else to occupy their burnt-out minds: the commotion within the lower reaches of the cemetery 90
made even these alcohol zombies react. While Heather rocked beside the ash of the dead fire, crooning to her bottle, the others staggered to their feet and stumbled down the path to claim a better view. Maybe, in the depths of their stewed brains, some curiosity remained. Or maybe they thought they could blag some more booze.
Hippies and punks, skinheads, Rastas and rockers, all together in one organised movement. And they weren’t fighting. Something powerful indeed was happening here, Nick reflected as he sat on the wide stairs of the crematorium chapel and watched the roadies prepare yet another gig. This was the largest audience yet
- he hadn’t been able to visualise the size of the convoy until now, as more and more vehicles had been tagging on as it wound through the Southwest. Many travellers had followed the slow-moving collection of vehicles on foot, which hadn’t been a problem considering just how slowly they had progressed. Just like they had all the time in the world. And in that moment of early summer, the realisation struck Nick that for once they had.
And now this ragged army surged before the cluster of tombs the band had chosen to be their latest stage. Hippies smoked joints, punks spat and belched and swigged beer, but nobody seemed to give a toss about the cultural or musical differences that normally divided them. They were embracing a single cause -
thirty-something bikers with Led Zeppelin on their leather backs to spine-haired Vicious clones with Sham ‘69 tattoos. And Nick had never seen anything like it.
Dusk was falling. The battered generator, lugged from the cattle truck and positioned on top of a large sarcophagus, glinted in the last of the sunlight. One of the roadies carelessly slung a guitar into the overgrown grass; another denim-clad roadie leant the bass guitar a bit more delicately against a headstone, while the giant emerged from the back of the truck cradling drums. Wires were trailed through the long grass and connected to the amps roosting on tombs.