It had been a strange 24 hours; I mean very strange. On a scale of 1 to 10, one being just a little odd and ten being extremely fucked up and incomprehensible, then this was a definite ten, maybe dare I say it, a touch more than ten. I suppose in a way, Joan of Arc could have described her last 24 hours as a bit different and unusual as she burned away to ashes and screamed herself to death, cursing her God that made false promises to her, and maybe even the Russian mystic, Grigori Rasputin could have described his last 24 hours as a touch peculiar as he was repeatedly stabbed, shot and thrown into a river to drown and die. Strange days happen and this was no exception for a group of lads from Scunthorpe.
In one single day, five of the most famous and wealthy rock stars the world had ever known, had been transported back in time to become their younger, broke selves again. Back to a time when nobody recognised them, a time where they were all skint, a time of Miners’ Strikes and mass unemployment, and also a time with no internet porn, and for these guys, it was like going back to the stone age.
* * *
The ‘John Smiths’ metal bar tray had seen better days, and as Freddy paid for the round of drinks that had been placed on it, he told the barman to “Keep the change fella” even though the drinks had come out of his last fiver. The barman who rarely received tips in a run-down and mouldy pub such as this smiled and pocketed the small number of coins for himself.
Freddy lifted the tray and carried it to a cluster of tables that he and his bandmates had taken over for the night. “There you go,” he said, and he handed a beer to Duckegg who was sitting on his girlfriend’s extremely fat knees as she ran her big loving fingers through his hair.
There was a lot of hair to run through and it was all long and full of hairspray. Some would say that it was cool to look like the lead singer of A Flock of Seagulls, with a strange style of quiff that would only ever be fashionable for a few years in the early eighties, never to return, ever. The cross between the new romantic look and something out of a Flash Gordon movie didn’t go with the thick prisms of his glasses, but he didn’t care. Elton John made it famous looking like a twat, so why couldn’t he?
Nobody could ever tell who Duckegg was talking to when he spoke, as his glasses were so thick that it made his eyes look in all directions, which is probably why he fell in love with Gloria, AKA ‘7up’, a local slapper from the Steel Works offices who famously screwed 7 drunks behind the local nightclub in one sitting.
Most of the other members of the band had the same hairstyle and spent hours perfecting it, except for one, Andy. He worked as a card dealer at poker matches for a local gangster so it would have been unbecoming of him to have a hairstyle that made him look more of a woofter than Boy George, so he shaved his head to make himself look hard and menacing.
Matt sat sipping from a silver hipflask that he stole from an old schoolteacher years ago. The miserable old git was an alcoholic and turned in pissed up most days, so Matt figured the best way to wind him up was to steal what meant the most to him, and that was his hip flask. His trendy clothing and frilly collars were bought from the local market and always straight in from London, or so he was told by the market traders. Frilly cuffs and collars were always in vogue even though he didn’t iron one piece of clothing. His jet-black hair was as long as it was when the band first started whilst they were still at school, and then, as now, it covered his eyes. He always was a scruffy cunt thought Freddy.
A beautiful woman with high Slavic cheekbones sat at the table with Matt and held his hand whilst secretly smiling at him. Freddy never could understand what Ina Kowalski saw in him, but if love was blind, then in, this case, it was outright mad as well. She was convinced she had the gift of second sight and made a bit of money from séances and Tarot reading and claiming that she could communicate with spirit guides. The first time Freddy met her was at a party at Matt’s flat. She was conducting a séance and at that time, Freddy and Andy had been convinced she was a spiritual fraud. But events since then had proved them wrong.
As he headed towards the table where Gary and his long-time girlfriend Lucy Petch had taken root, the soles of his shoes stuck to the ageing carpet, the remnants of a thousand spilled drinks and blood from endless fistfights squelching beneath his feet. Gary always treated Lucy very poorly, his jealous rages were too much for her to handle and she finished their relationship many times, just for Gary to apologise and worm his way back into her life. Lucy had always been such a sweet darling to be around since their old school days, and it pained the bandmates to see the way Gary treated this beautiful friend of theirs.
Gary as with all the band members had a special place in Freddy’s heart, he could keep his mouth shut and keep secrets. The children's home where Freddy lived was typical of the care that a child from that era could expect. Violence and abuse were an everyday occurrence at that place and the annual visits from Jimmy Saville and Gary Glitter were a pain in the arse, but Freddy decided enough was enough, and a taste of rough justice was to be handed out to the most abusive of all the carers.
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Don’t ask him how old he was – 12 or 13 – Freddy got his hands on a baseball bat and hid at the back of the children's home where ‘Sausage fingers’ liked to settle on a low brick wall to smoke his pipe at the end of the day. As he lit it, Freddy approached him from behind and brought the bat down with every ounce his skinny body could muster. Sausage fingers slumped to the floor, and as the enormity of what he’d just done hit him, Freddy jumped over the wall and down the alley towards the football ground where Duckegg, Andy, Gary, and Matt were waiting for him. His best friends were to be his alibi and he trusted his friends with his life. Sweat poured from him because he knew that very shortly, his persecutor, dead or alive, would be found and that was certain to mean police and a long spell in prison.
“How’d it go?” said Duckegg nervously.
“If he isn’t dead, he’s as good as.”
Duckegg cleaned the bat with bleach and rags just in case he was caught before he disposed of it, while Gary and Matt helped him swap his clothes for football gear. Then Duckegg ran off with the clothes and bat to throw them into the molten waste behind the steelworks. Within minutes all evidence turned into ash and Duckegg made his way back to the football pitch. The four of them separated to go home as if they’d done nothing more than kick a ball around. Sausage Finger's body wasn’t discovered ‘til morning and the culprit was never found. What they’d done created a bond between them. It was a secret so dark, they never spoke about it, but it wasn’t their only dark secret, and sooner or later their partners were going to have to be told. The question was… how?
It had been forty years since they had last inhabited these young bodies, and they were now with their girlfriends again whom they hadn’t seen in decades. Freddy’s partner, Lara, had opted for a table in an alcove. As he joined her, she gazed into his eyes with a look that he hadn't seen in a long time, a look of love and heart-warming plans together that never got fulfilled. He and his bandmates had lived a different life in a different reality, a different universe. To them, this was in the past, forty years to be precise, and fuck was it weird.
He’d missed her so much, but she’d had nothing to miss in her world, in her reality. So far as she was concerned, tonight was just a night like any other. She was in a pub with her boyfriend who harboured dreams of one day making it, as big rock stars. She doubted Freddy and the band would ever make it big, but so long as the dream was alive, she’d do her best to support him.
She wasn’t to know that they had already made it big, with forty years of amazing success and fame, or what Freddy and the rest of the band had agreed to, to make that happen. She wasn’t to know that Freddy would walk away from her when they became famous, or that for Freddy and the rest of the band, tonight was day one of the three hundred and sixty-five days that they’d been given to find a way out of their contract with that little bastard the Devil. I have to tell her, thought Freddy, but how? How do you explain the inexplicable? It was at that moment that Ina fell into one of her spiritual trances.
At one time, they would simply ignore her crazy blabbering, without the slightest interest being shown to her, but times had changed, the lads had changed, they'd been to places that would make Dr Who’s hair turn grey and they now knew better than to just ignore a Psychic.
“I’ve just had an experience,” she said. I’ve had a message. . . from the spirit world.” The boys' hearts nearly froze upon hearing this, they knew too well the spirit world existed, and they each knew what was in there.
“You need help,” said Ina. “It’s a message for all of you, and the message is. . . you need to find God.”
The barman lifted his sweaty head from pulling a pint as he overheard her and shouted, “We don’t want none of that religious claptrap in here love. There’s no God in Scunthorpe, he fucked off and left this place long ago. If you want to proclaim the Lord, you’ll have to proclaim him outside. I won’t have my patrons subjected.” But to be honest with you, none of his patrons cared, they lifted their heads for a second and soon went back into the world of booze and numbness.
The five of them knew exactly what she meant though and a shiver streaked down their spines as the reality hit home that maybe, just maybe, Ina did indeed have a gift from the spirit world, a world where they had done a deal with the Devil, and they knew that he existed, and if that was the case, so must God. The five boys looked at each other, too scared shitless to speak, too frightened to give away their secret to their partners.
“Err so, err, aannd err just where the fuck can we find God.” Asked Andy sheepishly.
Ina went back into her trance with everyone quietly paying attention to her this time and for five long minutes, she rolled her eyes back into her skull and hummed away like some demented lunatic on drugs with the barman watching and shaking his head. She suddenly came out of the trance and demanded a pen and a piece of paper. The barman who was now as transfixed on this strange behaviour as everyone else, quickly produced the needed pen and paper and gave it to Ina, and then backed off as if her head was about to spin around due to some sort of demonic possession.
Without even looking at the paper and with her eyes tight shut, she quickly scribbled the Holy abode of God onto the paper and then collapsed onto the floor with nobody paying attention to her, they were more interested in what was written on the paper.
Andy, a tough member of the band and card dealer for a local gangster, tentatively reached for the piece of paper on the table and put it before his eyes. He certainly wasn’t a religious man but the experiences that the band had with that gob shite the Devil, made him realise that there must be a God. He focused his eyes on the paper with everyone asking “What does it say, what does it say”?
“It’s an address.”
“What address, an address to where?” Asked Gary. “Tibet? Israel? India?”
“It’s an address on a council estate in Barnsley.”