He’d thought a butler would answer. Possibly the sous chef, doubling up on duties. At the very least a maid commuting from Skinningrove twice a week for a tenner’s worth of dishes. But it was just a young lass in a dressing gown. Alfie looked up at the umpteen unwashed windows stretching off either side of the door and then back at the teenager. It might have been Covid. Or Brexit. Maybe even Mad Cow Disease back in the day what with all the fields surrounding the joint. Whatever it was, times was hard for all of them.
“Hi,” said Alfie. “I’m Alfie.”
The young lady looked uncertain. It probably wasn’t so much Alfie as the ‘54 reg Kia behind him on the vast sea of gravel one would call a driveway round here. The red one, with one blue door. And cardboard where the driver’s window was supposed to be. And one hubcap. Alfie was proud he’d managed to keep that all this time. Especially having to go over those bloody potholes to the chippy every Friday.
“Well go on, bloody say something,” said Roger to his right.
“Yeah, tell ‘er why we’re here,” John piped up to his left.
Alfie looked back at the teen, who was starting to realise that getting off the couch was usually a bad way to live your life. She was also shutting the door in his face.
“You bloody say something,” he said over his shoulder.
“Fine,” snapped Fred. Fred was Alfie’s colleague in the mittens (not the green ones, that was Mike) and the knackered bomber jacket (not the bomber jacket over on John’s right by the flowerpot. Roger’s jacket was merely distressed). “Right, young missy, sorry to disturb you, but we’re The Architects. Now I know you’re probably eager to get back to your Tamogotchi or your Poke-i-oh, but we’re wondering if you’d let us in to see to a bit of business.”
By the time he’d got to the end, the chain was on the door. The young lady’s face had shifted from vague uncertainty to the face one makes when five shady looking fat bastards pull up outside your isolated old mansion filled with priceless portraits of dukes and jewelled snuffboxes and whatnot and wobble up to surround you on your own doorstep looking greedily down the hallway, which is precisely what was happening.
“Err, no,” said the girl. She fumbled in her pocket for her phone and prepared to activate the bluetooth flare gun on the fourth-floor smoking room balcony which would alert Daddy over in his billiards conservatory across the lake to the danger. But just in time, Alfie found his voice.
“It’s not like that, my love. It’s just that we need to break into my great-grandad’s secret vault what’s hidden somewhere in your dining room so that we can retrieve a long-lost artifact for a very important mission, and we have to do it within-” And he looked at his watch. “Oh, about twenty minutes or so.”
The door was flung wide. “Oh cool. Do come in.”
“About time,” growled Fred, puffing ice-cold steam across his mittens, which, as you will recall, were not green. “It’s bloody baltic.”
Panting and wheezing, the stubble-ridden gentlemen jostled into the hallway, looking round in amazement at all the expensive bric-a-brac within. “Fuck me!” cried John. “I paid forty bloody quid for me and Angie to go to that hall thing, and it wasn’t half as posh as this. The bloody ceiling’s got pictures on it!”
“Language!” Alfie hissed, but he didn’t blame John, not really. Because there really were pictures painted on the ceiling, like what they had in that Sixteenth Chapel in France. Looking round at all that gold and silver, Alfie couldn’t help a slight pang of loss with every ceremonial spoon he took in. Because this had been his family’s, and his great-grandad had only managed such lofty heights because of his work in the Architects. As for Alfie, he could only hope that Billy came through with that warehouse gig for him next week so he could pay that weird anorak lad in the alley for a whiff of weed. Each step he took across the marble tiles of the antechamber was a gloomy reminder of just how far they’d all fallen. They were in dire straits all right, and not the ones with Mark Knopfler in them.
The girl was looking a bit phased again, so Alfie asked her her name as they crossed the lion-watched threshold into the hall proper. “I’m Jane,” said Jane, the sparkle of diamonds glinting across her hair from the chandeliers. “And you said you’re...?”
“The Architects. My great-grandad, he was a founding member. We’re calling here for a... special request, I suppose. Something that has to be done, for someone.”
“Does it really though?” Fred squawked from behind a vase that looked too old, expensive and worryingly fragile to be in the vicinity of Fred’s twenty-stone bulk. “I mean, it’s probably cost us thirty quid for this detour, now the Shitmobile does about a yard a gallon. And we’re only gettin’ two hundred for tonight.”
Jane was looking less phased and more about to ask what they were being paid for, and where, and when. Now she’d really let the cat out the bag, or the murderous-looking men into the mansion more like, she’d decided she might as well get a bit of amusement out of it before the dismemberment was to begin. In a jolt of panic, Alfie cut her off as they entered the dining room with its table large enough to serve suckling hippo on. “Well, here we are.... in the dining room, but where next?” He just couldn’t face revealing his true identity in front of this sweet young thing. Was that... embarrassment he felt? At what he’d always been? Or what he’d become?
But everything was okay, because Roger was here, the one who always saved them when things got a bit hairy. Usually, it was turning on the charm out of that dark brooding plum of a face like a lightbulb, winning people over just when it looked like they were about to make plum jelly out of his hawkish beak. He wasn’t the greatest at operating the instruments, but he obviously had more practicality about him than Alfie had thought, because when Alfie turned he was halfway down a narrow flight of steps that he’d conjured from beneath a rolled-up corner of rug.
“Bloody hell!” John said. It was a very Johnish thing to say.
Roger pulled awkwardly at his burger-stained polo shirt as he looked up at his old comrades and the gawping girl across the gleaming mahogany floorboards. “Well, it’s just like the song, isn’t it?” he said, somewhat defensively.
“That hardly narrows it down,” Mike muttered.
“Well, don’t you see?” the top half of Roger insisted. He waved dramatically around the twinkling trove about the dining table, laid with enough silver to fund the invasion of North Africa. “The glass sun? Teatime in the castle?”
“My Secret!” Alfie gasped, then looked round to see if any of the others had detected excitement in his tone, because this was supposed to be a thoroughly miserable experience for everyone. But it was true; that song, passed down from Architect to Architect across the long generations, perfectly described their search and their surroundings. Everyone knew that there was a little animosity between the original circle and their descendants, and yet, good old great-grandad had left them a perfect clue anyway.
“The chatter goes on and on,” wailed Alfie. Everyone winced. His vocal cords simply were not designed to reproduce pleasant melody.
“It’s teatime in the castle,” Fred choked out, taking up the cat’s chorus, gesturing wildly at the table close to Roger’s head.
“But beneath the glass sun’s glow,” Mike, glancing at the big chandelier above the staircase, whispered reluctantly.
“I can escape their hassle,” John, who could actually create a drone generously described as tuneful if presented with a partially deaf audience, as long as there was a generator or washing machine going off somewhere close by, proclaimed.
By now, Roger, who’d once disposed of a money spider when it had gotten into the middle of a session and scared the willies out of the rest sometime around midnight, had bravely soldiered on downwards to God knows where.
Well, God and Alfie, because that was not the end of the song.
“Down I go, where the shadows lie long,” he called, and he followed Roger onto the wooden steps. The other man was gone. It was also pretty dark, a la the lyrics. “You alright mate?” he called into the gloom.
A shriek of pain thundered back along the tunnel. Roger returned to the half-light at the bottom of the steps, both hands writhing at his previously featured hawkish beak. “I found a bloody door,” he squeaked, kicking helplessly at the bare bricks of the tunnel wall in rage.
“Well the next line is ‘Along I creep to my blanket strong,” said Mike as he peered down into the depths.
Roger shook his head in disgust. “When the hell’s a big fuck-off iron door been a blanket?” He stomped back up the steps and plonked his cobwebbed arse down on an alarmingly creaky carved oak chair at the table.
“Well, it’s like poetry, isn’t it?” Mike insisted, pursuing his opportunity to ridicule to the very last. “What you’re supposed to do when you write words to songs. Not everything’s literal.”
“This is a bit more literal than I thought,” Fred cut in as he joined Mike by the steps. “I thought it was about someone sneaking off from a party for a cheeky wank.”
“Language!” Alfie said again, but when he looked around for Jane, she was already past him and into the sunken channel in the middle of her dining room floor. The lads did some half-hearted raising of fingers in protest, but no-one wanted to follow her into the hole. There might have been spiders.
“Jane?”
The reply sounded dull and weedy, far further away than Alfie expected. “... the next line?”
The only options left to them were to answer or run off to Cuba with the ancestral doilies, so Alfie decided to be a gentleman and opted for the former. “Errr....and only my love may enter.”
The response sent Mike and Fred scrambling back from the precipice in wonder. The voice of an angel was streaming down the tunnel, high and warm and clear and beautiful in a way a bloke like John could never be. “With a heart to which I belong,” sang Jane, and then there was a groaning sound like a big door sliding back into a groove, which turned out two minutes later on Jane’s return to be a perfectly accurate description.
“Cool,” she called up into the amazed faces of her visitors. “There must have been some sort of mechanism that unlocked the door when I sang the note. Resonance or something, Daddy would know.”
John poked one toe tentatively onto the first step down. “Well, what was on the other side? Maybe you should go and scout ahead in case there’s more... singing traps?”
“Okay,” said Jane, already turning at the corner at the bottom of the steps. “I mean, there was a working light switch, so I can see it’s just a room with old boxes-”
John clicked his fingers and flicked them over his shoulder. “Ah, I see. You’ve now had your destiny as a girl who has the token solution to a problem by being girly, so off you go.”
“Oh, I...” Jane stuttered, but she soon got out the way as John brushed past, a moth to the comforting safety of the electric light promised at the end of the passage. Mike followed, and then Alfie, who wanted to stay and apologise to the girl as she shuffled off towards the front door. But Roger was still there, nursing his swollen schnoz, and Fred, who seemed to be resignedly comparing the width of the opening to his own girth, so he couldn’t say anything anyway. Everyone hated each other already; he couldn’t give them any ammunition by appearing soft. And besides, she’d got off lightly with men of their trade; she wouldn’t have lasted two minutes with the old Architects, creepy bastards. He watched her go and followed his colleagues through towards the yellow square at the end of the rough, uneven cobblestones at the bottom of the staircase.
It was a good seventy feet or so to the other end, and there was a sound of water halfway along that Alfie prayed wasn’t Mike taking the piss by taking a piss. Luckily, it was only a pipe from somewhere up above, the servants’ swimming pool or summat, so on he went. There was no sign of the door any more; Jane had somehow put an end to that little complication. Time to put an end to the whole thing. They had to be getting going, really, if they were to make it to the mission in time.
The room wasn’t the sort you’d expect to be at the end of a secret tunnel at the end of some secret stairs in the dining room of a grand nineteenth-century palace. Or was it? It was the first such room Alfie had been in. But it was pretty boring. Just a little square space full of shelves and full of three men. Damp white plaster, damp black paving slabs. On the shelves were a load of black and white photographs that Alfie had neither the time nor inclination to study. In Mike’s hand there was a sheet of old paper with typewritten print down one side. In Mike’s eye was the cold glare of exasperation. “What a cunt,” he snarled, handing the letter over to Alfie. “Let’s get this over with and get the hell on with the rest of our lives.”
Congratulations on accessing the Archive of the Architects, the smudged note read. By the presence of a lady in your ranks, I assume you are one of my original colleagues in need of aid. Young pretenders just aren’t suave enough to traverse the world in the company of the fairer sex.
What a cunt, Alfie agreed in his head, and said “Hey! That’s my family you’re talking about, yer prick!” out loud.
Although I am certain that you are a true member, the treasures held within this vault are too valuable to trust to a single trial. It will soon become apparent that you must prove your loyalty through a series of tasks, riddles and charades in order to access our finest and oldest of works.
“Just shut the fuck up, and get over here and help, yer daft wazzock,” Mike boomed, rounding fully on Alfie. His battered leather jacket filled the air like the wings of an elderly and completely past-it bat as he raised his fists.
And remember, the label gets 95% and no more. I sold a yacht for you.
Regards
Reginald Simmons, AKA Duke Dapper, 1969.
“Fuck me,” John moaned. “It’s ten to fucking four. If you don’ get yer shit in ten bloody minutes, Alf, I’m taking me equipment and buggering off.”
“Just... give me five.” Alfie looked from man to man, crowding him towards the door. When did they get so grim, so boring? They were knackered, done in, haggard, all of them. But maybe this mission, Alfie’s own, picked up from the doormat one sunny morning last week, just maybe it could show them all how important this all was. Himself included. He wanted to be convinced, but beset from the past and the present like this, he really couldn’t see much hope.
But this would make Duke Dapper proud, right? Back to the old ways?
He thrust his flabby belly straight at the two fogies in front of him, who wisely parted like in some old Bible story and squeezed their own bulbous features against the shelves of photographs. There wasn’t just the things round the outside. In front of him, he beheld.... a sideboard. Pretty nice. Heavy-looking. He vaguely wondered if Jane would let him haul it back for his missus once all this was over, seeing as no-one was enjoying it down here. Save the marriage and The Architects. Brucie bonus.
The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
For now, because there was only nine minutes left before John did his buggering off he’d been prattling on about, Alfie got to some actual work. It wasn’t a normal sideboard. Befitting its status as a quest-hub of esoteric challenge, it had loads of holes drilled into it, big ones and small ones, plywood boxes hammered on, letter-boxes where one might slip in a daring hand and grasp the treasures he sought. Maybe not great for the wife, then.
“Eight minutes,” said John.
“Bloody hell, okay.” Alfie leant forward, hands on the dusty, paint-flecked main horizontal surface, and focused at random on the three biggest boxes stuck onto the top, right in the middle. There was another typewritten note pinned to the middle, which he promptly snatched up in his sweaty mitts.
Firstly, the prized Nottingham sessions, Duke Dapper rambled from beyond his gold-and-heroin-laced grave. Exquisite collector’s pieces. Taken from those money-grubbing Londoners to keep them out of the hands of the pretenders. And so I ask the most important question, the one that matters most to my heart, the one thing you’ll understand if you are truly one of us. When did The Architects break up?
Like the machine-precision detective Alfie wished he was, he soon made out the fine ink spelling out the answers. 1965, said the left box. Never, the spirit of The Architects will live on for all to enjoy, said the middle box, in tiny text that got even tinier at the end, where the y had been granted its own line at the bottom. 1964, when that thieving fool Earl Gaudy made off with the full advance for My Heart Yearns (Only For You), despite his sole contribution being the brackets, said the right.
Alfie barely paused. The old struggle with the new, the march of time becomes harder and harder to keep up with, Lord knows they themselves knew that. But for all his ancestor’s bluster, family was family. Duke Dapper will have seen that in the end.
Alfie, who had the memory of approximately 3.7 goldfish, and didn’t understand old-fashioned fancy talk, carefully reached out, opened the flap of hinged pine ahead, and extended his right hand into the middle box.
There was nothing at first. He inched deeper. Nothing. And then his finger caressed the edge of what he was looking for. Something cold and metallic.
The snap was like a gunshot in the confined space. The pain was instant, and fiery hot.
“Fuuuuuck!” Alfie screamed.
“Fuck this,” said John, and fucked off.
“Fuuuuuck!” Alfie screamed. His fingers felt five inches wide and as heavy as a bowling ball and throbbed with white agony. He tried to withdraw his hand from the trap but something had latched on, scraped and clung to the edges of the letterbox, rattled as he squirmed and roared.
“Fuck!” Mike shouted.
Then he turned his hand sideways and it came out, longer and silver at the end, and finally, through the panicked shadows closing in at the corner of his vision, he made out his unwanted extension for what it was.
“A fucking mousetrap?” he screeched, waving his hand in the air like a pincer. “Get it off me! Help me! Now!”
“If you’d actually stay still rather than kicking round like a baby...” Mike wrestled him still and plucked the old device from the victim’s hand. The fingers were plump and bruised black beneath; the originals didn’t do things by halves.
“What a fucking twat!” Alfie spat, quite literally, over Mike. He couldn’t take his eyes off his hand. The fingernails were already going a nice girly purple. “He set an actual legit fucking trap! He injured me! Over this!”
Just then, there was a rumbling behind, and then John burst in like a freight train, all wild eyes. The return of the king.
“Right. I’m sick of this fucker.” He buffeted Mike, staring cynically at the sideboard as if it might produce a machine gun from some greased and highly polished panel, and Alfie, whimpering sweet nothings at his abused digits, out the way and raised his arm. The cold glint of steel shone in the weak bulb. “Riddles my arse!”
He brought the hammer down on the left-hand box, hard. The old plywood exploded into woodshavings at the impact, filling the air with a choking must. Before Alfie could even return to the ground from his impromptu leap, John was already at the right box, shoving one careless arm into the wreckage and thrusting a large square of paper at his healthy hand. “There. Now take this and fuck off.” And out he stormed, Mike close at his heels.
Alfie took one more look around the room, breathing in the damp and the wood and the damp wood. All that research, trawling through tons of boring forums, doing research like he was at some science lab or summat, looking for this house; all those secret hopes that this night could renew their faith in something that had stood the test of time so long; it was all crushed beneath the black weight of incredulous rage. But it was replacing another weight now, wasn’t it? There was bitter relief there too, a release from hope. “Fucker hurt me,” he growled, following the others through the tunnel and up the stairs. “If he wants it all to end, then he’s got what he wants.” He laughed maniacally. “And I’ll still get the royalties, baby.”
All £2.56 a month, unless he put on his best croaky voice and requested something on the golden oldies station, drum up a bit of interest. Then he might have enough for a meal deal.
Upstairs, the rest had reconvened, Fred and Roger waiting expectantly for Alfie to emerge. They took one look at his hand and burst into smoky, peg-toothed laughter. They were a sorry sight themselves amid the pristine splendour of the hall. “Fuck me, it’s true,” said Fred, putting out his fag on a pewter butter dish. “I mean, it would hurt us big time tonight if you actually did any playing or if anyone actually cared.”
“Fuck off, Fred.” Alfie was already waddling sullenly for the door and the fresh countryside air beyond. Any other circumstances and he’d be horrified at losing his playing ability right before a gig, but that seemed a tiny stupid thing now. He’d lost his family, two families, today, his whole identity. And the physical damage wasn’t so bad anyway. When the trap had first gone off, he thought there’d been a big poison snake, a cobra or something caged in there for the past forty years, saving up its venom, getting hungrier and angrier by the decade. That would have been a better trap. So maybe The Architects weren’t so bloody big and clever as they thought they’d been.
He’d gotten to the last chamber before he took in the music. He’d almost forgotten Jane too, what with his near-death experience and all that. But there she was, halfway up the grand staircase, with familiar sounds sweeping like a river through her. Alfie would know that sweet sixties guitar-jangle anywhere, felt his fingers pluck the air instinctively to form the notes. Usually when he heard it, he was playing it after all.
The chatter goes on and on
It’s teatime in the castle
But beneath the glass sun’s glow
I can escape their hassle
“So, you’re a fan, eh?” Alfie called up miserably. It solved one mystery then, one he hadn’t even realised was a mystery until now, of how Jane had known that line to unlock the vault. It had never occurred to him that one so young and with an actual life ahead of her might have heard of them, let alone actually own some records. He vaguely wondered if it was an old hand-me-down, one that might get a big nasty scratch soon and warrant a nice replacement in the form of a 50th Anniversary box set with two extra sides of Duke Dapper trying to strangle Earl Gaudy in a studio rehearsal, for £114.99. He kept his head down, one hand on the front door, cringing with shame.
Of course she was a fan. It was the only reason that a person shoved out the way like a broken toy in her own home would be able to convince themselves that the visitors were still awesome enough to stand smiling as they rampaged across the ground floor, even when they hadn’t changed into slippers.
“When you said The Architects, I was like, ‘cool’, I know a band called that,” Jane chirped from her vantage point. “But I still hadn’t clicked that you were to do with them until you started with this song. It’s one of my favourites! I’ve got all their records! Be Mine, My Heart Lies in Skinningrove, Romance on the Dales...they were pretty decent.”
Were.
“Do you have any of the Eighties stuff?” Alfie had opened his disobedient gob before he’d even had time to think.
To his surprise, her face lit up even more. She was a proper beauty; lovely girl, really. “Wow! They went on into the Eighties? They must have been going round in Zimmer frames by then.”
Alfie grimaced playfully. “Well, I will be eventually, but it’s not that long ago, you know.” This was turning out to be the best conversation he’d ever had. She was so young!
But beauty can turn ugly really fast. Jane’s face was a blur of pure scowl as she waved her head, backing up the stairs. “Wait...what? You’re actually in the band? I thought you were one of the greats! But you have to be dead to be great. You know, flown off your motorbike doing one-fifty after an orgy and a kilogram of cocaine.” She paused, a second wave of horror wavering over her angelic cheeks. “You don’t... still make music do you? Play in dirty social clubs in poor cities? Do beastly things to classics that only people in the know should know?”
Alfie, who was possibly going to be late for the Blasts from the Past farewell tour at Eston Social Club in Middlesbrough, and part of the group who had just released Magnificent: Twenty-Two Reworked Hits Featuring Full Orchestra, with a Special Christmas Twist (number 122 in the UK; 76 in Germany, who were obviously educated connoisseurs of the aural arts), said nothing.
With a click of her heels, Jane spun on her vast expanse of stair. “Do see yourselves out, gentlemen. I’m going to burn my records.” And then, for the second time in fifteen minutes, she stomped away.
Twenty seconds later, as the rest of The Architects assembled, Baron Brilliant was cut off in the middle of his third heart-wrenching oooh.
“That’s it, then,” said Alfie gloomily into the sudden quiet.
“Happy with your little trip to the zoo?” Fred sneered.
Alfie wanted to come up with something that expressed all his tired hate for the crude, rude, untalented, greedy little excuses for bandmates he’d worked with for thirty years, preferably a single word of three or fewer syllables, but he couldn’t think of anything so he settled for a meek and strengthless “No.”
“Told you so, yer bellend,” said John. He motioned to the paper sleeve, still clutched in Alfie’s less horribly mangled arm. “You’ve got your thingamajig. Let’s get off to Maccy D’s and get this shit done.”
He opened the door. Cold and unfeeling, they got their shit done.
----------------------------------------
1985 was his. He cut through the sediments of robot drones like a rapier, battled the synthesised beats armed with a rainbow string arsenal, sharp and keen as the cry of a hawk, or sombre and plodding and plucking, a low subterranean lament, the coming of winter.
He saved them all, a rippling electric messiah. Shored up the crumbling bastion, rotten through with boredom and stagnation and cold, furtive plagiarism. He hadn’t been there for the first hesitant voyage onto the airwaves by the fourth line-up, the dull, uninspired, pounding headache of the latest album of a pile too high to count. Band photo, self-titled. Plain black list on the back, songs about girls, songs about dancing, songs about dancing with girls. All three minutes, or thereabouts. The single was two. It was called Midnight Moves and it had two verses and three choruses neatly boxed in above its neat boxed drum machine. It had a video with a girl dancing at midnight. John’s girlfriend for two unremembered New York weeks. Alfie thought it had got to number 33, or maybe it was only 36.
But he’d been on the other side then, through the magenta oestrogen-infused miasma fogging the stage, looking in. He’d given the record a couple of whirls and found thirty or so decent seconds so gave them a shot when the Shakespeares had sold out before he’d had chance to go down to the box office. Half the crowd had left by half-nine, muttering through the reedy rise and fall that carried Another Night through to its final blast of empty air. Alfie, who was bored and broke in equal measure, had joined them that very night. It wasn’t bad. It was just nothing. A canvas, a background, ready for the master-stroke of genius.
It didn’t hurt that he was the descendant of Duke Dapper either. This long chronology of warring genii, drumstick swords and six-stringed axes, made a great Theseus’ band of what had always been The Architects, and always would, no matter the current heredity, or the current genre, or whether they forgot about those early sweet, stately mega-hits that kept the money trickling down from bygone ages, or if they threw in a couple of blues bars on Roy’s or Gary’s or Mark’s or Fred’s keyboard every so often just to keep the howls of the purists at bay. Alfie was straight in, because everyone was bowled over by his soulful melodies and not because the family history gave them a nifty 10% royalty increase on Marvellous: The Architects: The Golden Age: 1948-1960: Remastered and Generally Dabbled About With. What the family history did do was bide them a bit of time away from the cut-throat deadlines of Music Shark’s label hounds for a few interviews, while Alfie settled in and peeled back the layers of soulless synthesisers and laid down the holy fingerwork that would become the backbone of the greatest Architects album of all time.
1985 would always be his.
Now though, it was 2013, and Alfie was sucking tomato ketchup from his poor tender fingers and listening to the dull industrial thud of his band grinding their way through one of their recent singles, which had proven quite the hit in Peru until they’d learned the garbled robot voice in the bridge had actually been inciting the locals to burn demon chickens in an ethnic minority tongue and had it taken down. They’d all had double horseburgers at the slimy roadside van when they couldn’t find the McDonalds, but Alfie had bought himself an extra tub of chips because he was a rockstar, goddammit, for the next five minutes of his ill-spent life, and he could be late for his own encore if he wanted to be. Actually, he could have not shown up for the encore at all, because he had exactly two palm-muted stutters in the verses of that awful penultimate song they still had to play that he had a loathing suspicion wouldn’t be missed.
But he’d insisted on the final song. He still had that, even if bringing The Architects to its final resting place here in this unadorned brick sarcophagus of a club hadn’t yet carried the emotion he so desperately craved. If he felt sad, just for a moment, then maybe the last thirty years had meant something after all.
Finally, the thudding ceased. He heard John screaming “Thank you!” and he did feel something then, a great sweeping glee at the dead silence that followed that he really shouldn’t be feeling. But that just settled things, didn’t it? This great awkward year, all those fights and sweaty lugging of amps and long periods of cold, stony silence in a hired conference room with blank pages and unplayed keyboards in front of them that the footnotes of a tired old magazine column would call creative difference, all of it was over as soon as he got his arse into gear and walked up those stairs and played those notes. All things had an end, and sometimes the best thing to do was just get on and reach it.
He took a glug of the room-temperature cider that the landlady had found at the back of an airing cupboard for him, and then he lifted the needle from the record he’d pilfered from the mansion and took a walk. His fingers still twitched to the chords as the dead weight of eighty years’ history clutched at his ankles on the stairs.
Up above, the crowd waited. “On guitar... Alfie Simmons,” John said into his microphone, somewhat like a teacher reading out the register on a Monday morning, and three, yes, three whole pairs of hands clapped somewhere from beyond the stage. Then they launched into Heartbreak Highway, the 1992 version where Alfie did the verses and Mike played that triangle note at the end of the chorus instead. Alfie stared out at the crowd, the sea of brown coats on the brown carpet with stale brown drinks in plastic cups held aloft, and decided he was at peace with how things had turned out. It had all fallen flat after the shimmering peak of 1985; the pounding synths with all the whimsical charm of a breeze block had re-emerged and taken over for good, but there were probably worse jobs out there than standing on a stage looking cool and holding a guitar. Like that warehouse job he’d be going to next week, if he was lucky.
But his bandmates were still all twats. And that was that.
After playing through the last verse, he let his guitar sag on its strap and gazed more intently at the faces looking back through the lights. There was eighty years of history up here too, it seemed. Geezers in jackets sloshing about in the sticky remainders of their half-pints. Middle-aged businessmen in the souvenir shirts that would possibly pay the electric next month, if not the gas. Trendy twenty-somethings in identical chequered shirts, looking desperately around for a fire exit and for anyone that would recognise them, though not necessarily in that order. That one creepy guy in the bunny hat that followed them everywhere, fluffy ears flapping as he bobbed with abandon. At least he was having a whale of a time. Alfie wondered if he’d come at them with a knife once it was all over, then decided it would probably be a relief all in all.
And at the back, all the old dears in cardigans and moth-eaten dress-shirts. Someone’s granny at a table, mouth agape, false teeth about to chatter off for the hills as the beat rumbled to a crescendo. Alfie knew how she felt. It was the look of someone lost in time. Someone waiting for the end.
And the end had indeed come. Blessed silence deafened the room. Someone coughed out a heartless cheer. People turned and went mumbling for the exits, the crossfire decision of that early night or meeting up with Geoff in town for a real sesh soothed by the happiness that whatever this had been was over.
But what had it been? How had it come to this? As Alfie finally picked out the person he’d been looking for all night, slumped in the back corner in his wheelchair, cocooned by a blanket and snug beneath his woolly hat even in the swelter of the auditorium, he realised that they were the wrong questions. Because it didn’t matter how it ended, not really. The rest was still there. Or had been there. Nothing lasts forever, or everything lasts forever. Possibly. Alfie didn’t like philosophy shit. He had a feeling it wouldn’t help him with whatever knackering, grime-soaked existence awaited him now. But maybe it would help him get through the next two minutes, at least.
“Get going, cunt,” John hissed in his ear. “I need a Jager. Not to mention Bunny Boy’s going to have a tantrum any minute, and he might as well wait ‘till I’m out of here. Laters.” And John, like the rest, were gone from his life. Ta ta. The end.
He was alone on the stage. An easy target. He looked nervously to the front, where real tears were definitely forming in Bunny Boy’s squinting eyes. But Bunny Boy didn’t matter. His wasn’t one of the ends in play. He’d get over this, had a whole story ahead of him.
Who mattered now was waiting at the back. He could have played something good for his epilogue. Something with a bit of bite. But if he always had his 1985, the man who’d written that frail, spidery letter deserved his 1948.
For the next two minutes, there would be no Duke Dapper or Alfie Simmons, only The Architects.
He stepped up to the microphone, into the space where most of his life and all of his efforts had just evaporated in a puff of menthol vape and garlic kebab. “And for my... our very last song, this is...” He looked down at the lyrics sheet taped to the rotten floorboards, closed his eyes, and drew a deep breath. “Whore of West Street.”
Fred was right. They really had been dirty bastards.
He played the first simple chords, and beyond the screeching throes of Bunny Boy, between the threadbare layers that did all they could to keep his weathered bones warm, across the seemingly insurmountable curtain walls of time itself, here at the end of the tale and there at the beginning, the old man began to smile.