This Could Be Rock 'N' Roll by Tim Roux Read Free Book Online

away with it, but you couldn’t.”
    I’m beginning to realise that everybody thinks I’m a boring old git. I think that increasingly myself. One day I’m going to smash my guitar on stage just to show them what I am capable of, except that I can’t afford a new one. Maybe I’ll spit at somebody in the audience instead. Or I could go the other way and ask for requests. “The Birdie Song. Coming up, Madam.” Some days I want to torch the world and dance around the fire, so I can’t be that boring after all, although my dancing leaves much to be desired.
    Needless to say, Kevin’s publicity is that his alter ego, Patricia, went to Roedean herself from which she was abducted by the son of an Arabian sheikh studying at Eton and Oxford before he slung her wriggling and struggling over his shoulder and lugged her onto his private jet, and that her books are therefore based on her real life experiences. Someday someone will do an exposé on him for Dispatches but Kevin boasts that it doesn’t matter because he really does know a Patricia Season who went to Roedean who really was abducted by the son of an Arabian sheikh; it is just that he ghost writes the books for her. You can pay some people to say anything. The really irking thing is that he is still the insufferably modest guy who drinks halves of lager and never speaks above a whisper I used to share a house with. The only way you know there is something to him is that he has a wicked twisted smile that appears for no obvious reason in the middle of a pregnant pause (hate that expression), so he is either an author or a sadist.
    Strangely enough, I have another ex-house mate who looks like he is going to be a successful author too - Nick Quantrill. His genre is private eye novels and he is beginning to get a lot of attention for his work which is actually worth reading so he’ll probably have to continue giving them away. Looks like he might finally have hooked up with a publisher though. Nick is quiet too and an accountant, so he looks death in the face day and night. He comes regularly to my gigs, and has done so for years, so he is officially a good lad whereas Kevin is never around nowadays - too busy running his property portfolio.
    It’s all a long way away from when we were sharing the house in Parkfield Drive. Kevin was the total slob, Nick was the tidy one, and I was the one out fishing for the birds with my guitar and my leather jacket (“I am an author doesn’t cut it in Hull; I write my own songs and perform them to crowds of fans” does). Near the end I met Cathy and she moved in with me which upset the entire balance of the house. Cathy and Kevin were forever having set-tos because Cathy resented picking up Kevin’s soiled clothing and discarded plates all the time, which shows you that tidiness is no indicator of future wealth. One day Kevin came back to the house with a girlfriend which surprised and delighted us all, except that she was not only the splitting image of my Cathy but she was actually called Kathy too. That made life very confusing. Nick, my-Cathy and I couldn’t work out why Kevin would go out and get himself a woman who was exactly like his tormentor (and mine, even in those days) but he was right - it worked. He and Kathy got married and they are still together. Me and my-Cathy haven’t been quite so lucky.
    The trouble is that now I cannot bear to see Kevin’s Kathy, although I don’t admit that to anyone. Kevin and I always meet up alone. He must guess the reason.
    I came back to the Parkfield Drive house unexpectedly one afternoon and Nick was behaving really strangely. I was trying to go upstairs for a piss - the only toilet being upstairs - and he kept finding excuses for stopping me. Eventually I said “Out with it, Nick. What’s going on? You are behaving really weirdly.”
    “I am?”
    “Yeah, you are.”
    “I don’t think so.”
    “Come on, Nick. There is definitely something. What’s going on