Wasted Years by John Harvey Read Free Book Online

old man could have played with if things had only fallen right: the Yardbirds before Jeff Beck, John Mayall’s Blues Breakers, Graham Bond, Zoot Money’s Big Roll Band. The night he should have depped for Mickey Wailer with the Steampacket, some big festival—instead of sitting behind the drums, his dad had popped too many pills and spent the set in the St John Ambulance tent throwing up.
    “Keith, you’re coming down here, fetch us a beer.”
    As far as Keith knew, his father’s only substantiated nights of near-glory had been back in sixty-four when he gigged with Jimmy Powell and the Five Dimensions, joining them in Nottingham when they were on the Mecca circuit and sticking it out until they were hired to back Chuck Berry on his British tour. First rehearsal, Chuck stopped short in the middle of his duck walk and asked who the motherfucker was trying to play the drums. That was it: beginning and end of his old man’s big career. For sale, one pair of Zildjian cymbals, one mohair suit, scarcely worn.
    “Keith, I thought I asked you to …”
    “Here. Catch.”
    The can bounced out of Reg Rylands’s hands and rolled across the basement floor.
    “What you doing down here?” Keith asked, snapping open the Carlsberg he’d fetched for himself.
    “Oh, you know, pottering around.”
    Keith grunted and snapped open his can.
    “What’s that you’ve done to your eye?”
    “That?” Keith said, gingerly touching the swelling, the bruise. “That’s nothing.”
    The house was two-story, flat-fronted, an end-terrace in the Meadows—one of those streets the planners overlooked when they ordered in the bulldozers on their way to a new Jerusalem. Keith had been born here, brought up; his mum had moved out when she divorced, lived now in a semi in Gedling with a painter and decorator and Keith’s five-year-old stepbrother, Jason. Keith’s father had stayed put, letting out first one room, then another, sharing the house with an ever-changing mixture of plasterers and general laborers and drinking mates who dossed down for free whenever their Social Security ran out
    “What’s this?” Keith asked, pointing at the Z-bed opened out along the wall. “You sleeping down here now?”
    “Just for a bit. Coz’s got my room.” He drank some lager. “You remember Cozzie. Some woman with him this time. Tart.”
    Keith didn’t know any Cozzie, but he could guess what he would look like: tattoos across his knuckles and scabs down his face. “Hope he’s paying you.”
    “’Course.”
    Which meant that he was not.
    “So what you doing here?”
    Keith shrugged. “Come to see you, didn’t I?”
    “You weren’t thinking of staying?”
    “Thought I might.”
    “What’s wrong with your mum’s?”
    “Nothing.”
    “Haven’t had a row?”
    “No more’n usual.”
    “So?”
    “Change, that’s all. Couple of nights.”
    “You’re not in trouble?”
    “No.”
    “You sure?”
    “Yes.”
    “Cause if it’s anything like before …”
    Keith hurled his half-full lager can at the floor and stormed towards the door.
    “No, Keith, Keith, hold on, hold on. I’m sorry, right?”
    Keith stopped, feet on the cellar steps.
    “You want to stay, that’s fine. Got a mattress I can bring down here, you take the bed.” Keith turned and came back inside. “Just for tonight. Bloke up top, moving out next couple of days. I’ll explain. Give him a nudge. It’ll work out, you see. Here …” He bent down and picked up the Carlsberg and handed it back to his son. “Like old times, eh?”
    “Yeh.”
    “Might go out later, couple of pints. What d’you think?”
    Keith sat down on the Z-bed and it rattled and squeaked. In an old chest opposite, fronts missing from two of the drawers, were his father’s clothes—those that weren’t draped anyhow across a succession of cardboard boxes or hanging from the back of the cellar door. A pile of shoes from which it might be difficult to find a decent pair. Bundles of old