Doctor Who_ The King of Terror - Keith Topping [56]
‘Never heard of him,’ said Tegan impatiently.
‘Good God,’ said Milligan. He got out of the car and pushed open the door to the record store. ‘What planet have you been on for the last decade?’
Tegan pondered this for moment as the door closed behind him. ‘Do you want a list?’ she asked no one in particular as she followed him.
Inside, the store was dark and crowded. At the far end, beneath a stark and grainy black-and-white enlarged photo of a toddler in a suburban garden, was a table at which sat a young man in his early thirties wearing a leather jacket and a white T-shirt. He had short, rusty-coloured hair, deep blue eyes mostly hidden behind tinted spectacles and an intelligent face tinged with a trace of tired sadness in the lines around his eyes. Here, Tegan instantly knew, was someone who had lived a lifetime or more of experiences in just a few short years. He was handsome, too, in a kind of streetwise, rugged, slept-in-my-own-mess-for-half-my-adult-life way. So, she thought, this was Johnny Chester.
Not half bad.
107
Tegan took a pace forward and, for a second, felt an unusual tingle up her spine as if someone has just walked over her grave. Déjà vu, she told herself.
But that was something she never suffered from. She had the ridiculous feeling that this was somebody she had known for years, intimately. Then Tegan had an even more preposterous feeling that he was somebody she would come to know. She shook her head, gave him one more (cursory) glance and then busied herself flipping through the ‘Rock L to Z’ section whilst Dave Milligan stood in line to see his idol.
‘So what’s the most outrageous rock and roll thing you’ve ever done?’ a teenage boy at the front of the queue was asking Johnny.
Johnny thought for a moment and then said, ‘When I was at college, there were these hippies, out of their brains on Adam Strange who lived across the road. They were into Yes and Genesis and they used to scream abuse at me because I was fifty years younger than them and didn’t have hair down my back and because I bought records by the Jam and the Clash and Buzzcocks.
So one day, I set fire to their house in the name of rock and roll, because they were complacent soulless, dope-smoking deadheads, too stoned to live.’
‘Is that true?’ asked the boy. Arson as a statement seemed to have great appeal to him.
‘Of course it’s not, y’great tosser!’ replied Johnny with a wink, and asked who he should make the book out to.
Dave Milligan waited for ten minutes, occasionally giving Tegan an apologetic glance, until he got to the front of the queue by which time she had found a book based on some old science-fiction TV show to read. In his hand Milligan held copies of the CDs Modernism and Can Anyone Tell Me Where the Revolution Is? ‘I’ve already got these,’ he told Johnny as he approached the table at last. ‘But I might as well have them again.’
‘Good man,’ said Johnny cheerfully. ‘Where you from, mate?’
‘Leicester,’ Milligan replied. ‘I don’t want to be a gushing fanboy nor nothing, but can I just tell you that “Circle Circus” changed my life?’
Johnny looked up and smiled wickedly. ‘That was pretty gushing fanboy . . .
Sorry!’
‘I know,’ said Dave. ‘I’m gutted about it!’
‘Have a copy of the book too. On me,’ said Johnny handing one across the desk. ‘It’s not bad, even if I do say so myself. Local author, apparently.’ He started to sign the CDs.
Milligan looked at the lurid cover of a young man sticking a revolver into his mouth, finger on the trigger. He flipped it over and scanned the blurb on the back underneath a staggering photo of the author standing on a hill in Wiltshire wearing a ‘Did you spill my pint’ T-shirt. He didn’t have the heart to tell Johnny that he already had a copy of this too.
108
‘See much of the other Star Jumpers these days?’ he asked. ‘Or is that an awkward question?’
Johnny Chester looked up and gave a practised, media-friendly smile that told Milligan this was about the twenty-ninth time he had been asked