of lemonade lizards

No one imagined that Maurice would ever retire. His pony tail and goatee had turned white and his skin had become wrinkled and pitted as walnut shells, but his eyes still sparkled as brightly as the day he’d walked into the Daffodil Lion in 1975 looking for casual bar work. Since that day, he’d hardly ever left the place.

For thirty years, Maurice lived in a small outhouse attached to the pub, acting as an impromptu security man, on-site maintenance engineer for the microbrewery and resident ghost. He had a habit of wandering outside on clear nights to look at the stars, and when half-pissed motorists taking the back lanes saw his beard in the moonlight, they took him to be some malevolent spirit. Indirectly, he was responsible for several nasty crashes on the sharp bend by the woods, two-thirds of a mile up the road, where petrified drivers braked too late and ended up through the hedge and in the field.

Maurice was a fixture at the Daffodil Lion, frozen in time, as much as any of the other fittings. The freehouse, which had last been decorated in 1972 following a small fire, was decked out in a garish blend of agricultural oddities and faux Eastern mysticism. Above the fireplace, a batik Shiva (lord of the cosmic dance, with three eyes and a necklace of snakes and skulls) hung over smudged wallpaper of huge blue and purple flowers. While on the windowsill, opium pipes and lurid lava lamps competed for space with parts of early milking pumps and apocalyptic scythes. The place was a relic, a museum piece, preserved like a man who stops shopping for clothes the day he retires and spends the next thirty years living in limbo and the same pair of nylon trousers.

Had the Daffodil Lion not been in the middle of nowhere, the outmoded decor would undoubtedly have been replaced as it assumed a series of new identities – just like the Goat and Compasses, a former freehouse, further up the Fettlington Road.

When the Westingshire Brewery took over the Goat and Compasses in the mid-seventies they favoured faux nineteenth century horse brasses and a liberal smearing of oak veneer. Then, in the mid-eighties, the recession and the bypass decimated passing trade, and the pub was brought out by a chain of Irish theme pubs.

Shamrocks sprouted liberally between reproduction Guinness mirrors. A fake toucan (with authentically chipped beak) perched beside a pile of charity shop Irish literature - Dubliners, Some Poems about Peat Bogs by Seamus Heaney, and the Beastly Beatitudes of Balthazar B (resplendent in late sixties Penguin cover). After a couple of years (following a period of savage, but necessary, consolidation in the beverage market) the loss making pub was again taken over and the old black bicycles taken down from the ceiling.

After another dramatic refit, the Goat and Compasses reopened in the nineties as a family eatery, a brewery clone with the same tables, menus and staff as a hundred other pubs across the West. There was the customary stubbled chef, with army tattoos and greasy, blue-checked apron, who could be seen most evenings puffing Lambert & Butlers in the kitchen doorway. While hovering at reception was the cocky young assistant manager - ‘fuck buddy’ to the menopausal barmaid on HRT, a brittle blonde with granny grey roots, the tight curve of her stomach stretching the cheap fabric of her mini-skirt as if she were in the third month of a pregnancy that had longsince become a physical impossibility.

But the Daffodil Lion was divorced from all that. It was not really a proper pub at all, just an oddity persevering in its hidden niche, an evolutionary freak, a freehouse dodo-in-waiting. Really, it should have been driven to extinction by the merciless appetite of the brewery brand builders, who would not be satiated until each independent inn in their neighbourhood was steamrollered and concreted over by the corporate cement mixer. But, somehow the Daffodil Lion still survived, a missed out misfit, unscathed in its sacred seventies bubble, a rare weed pushing up through the dull paving slabs of globalisation. And, having survived so long, it seemed no more possible that it could ever change than Maurice would ever leave.

When, one day late in 2001, Maurice announced he was going to fly to Canada, hire a Cherokee jeep and spend the rest of his days travelling between the cities, the mountains and the islands, we thought it was just Maurice being Maurice. We imagined it was merely a vocal acknowledgement that he was getting older, a whim that he would never act upon (as for three decades he had been no further than Westing, and then only twice a year).

But one afternoon he returned from Westing with a purple rucksack, a one way ticket to Toronto and a fistfull of travellers cheques. By the evening he was gone, with no party, no presentation, no silver tankard. He just evaporated like dregs of ale from the bottom of a glass, leaving only a slightly stale smell of dope and mould and sweat and age and coconut hair conditioner, which the landlady bought him from Safeways on the first Thursday of every month.

The last time I saw Maurice, he was waving at me from a taxi, with which I practically collided as I sped down the narrow, twisty lane that led to the Daffodil Lion. I had to hurriedly reverse my two fingered gesture, to a peace sign, which, though unintentional, seemed appropriate.

I couldn’t believe it when I reached the pub, and Mike the Landlord told me Maurice had actually gone.

“You’re winding me up,” I said.

Mike shook his head and polished a pint pot, eyes wet, unable to speak, though he’d moaned nightly that he’d ‘never be able to get rid of the old bugger.’

It was well over a year later that I saw Maurice again. It was just before Christmas, and I’d taken a train up to London to see some old friends, Chris and Nigel, who I’d once worked with in the warehouse of Westing Information Systems, or WIS (pronounced whizz) as it was ‘affectionately’ known.

I’d only worked with them for about six months, twelve years earlier, but somehow the Christmas drink had become a tradition that endured, haphazardly at first, when we bumped into each other in the pubs of Westing, and laterly thanks to

e-mail, now that they were both working in London.

Inevitably, after a couple of pints my carefully planned schedule of return train connections had collapsed, leaving me stranded alone at Reading in a frozen waiting room at four in the morning.

I’d been sat there for about twenty minutes, sideways on a seat by the wall, shivering with my collar turned up and my knees clutched to my chest, when in shuffled what I thought was a tramp or a seasonal Santa who, like me, had over imbibed.

The man had a huge white beard and masses of white hair. His cheeks and nose were red from cold. He was carrying a large and battered rucksack and he smelled like he had been sleeping in a shed. It was only when the man looked over at me, and I saw those deep twinkling eyes, that I realised it was Maurice.

“Hello,” I said, unfurling from my foetal repose. “It’s Maurice isn’t it, from the Daffodil Lion?”

Maurice eyed me suspiciously, then realised who I was and grinned.

“Well, get out of here,” he said. “What are you dong here?”

“I’ve been up to London to meet some old mates from Westing. Got a bit pissed and missed the last train.” I sighed and shivered dramatically. “Looks like I’m going to be here until the morning now. How about you? I thought you were in Canada?”

“I was, I was. Fantastic time. Brilliant country. Do you know Canada had a socialist Prime Minister for over twenty years? Pierre Trudeau. What a man. The only western power to have relations with Cuba. Do you know who was on the front row at his funeral?”

I shook my head.

“Fidel Castro. Sat there right next to Trudeau’s family. I tell you, man. You went to Canada from any country in the world, they welcomed you with open arms. They wanted you to bring your culture to their country, and live your life in your own way. There’s still no class there. Not like here. Everyone has the same education. Anyone can be anything, if they put their mind to it. And the forests and the coasts and the mountains… “

“Sounds brilliant,” I said. “Why didn’t you stay?”

“Well, it’s getting too American now. It’s not really their fault. When you think who’s across the border, the United States of Arseholes, broadcasting their crap twenty four hours a day. And the bastards didn’t like my passport.”

“The Canadian customs?”

“No, the arseholes.”

“What was wrong with it?”

Maurice looked offended.

“There was nothing wrong with it.”

“Sorry, I didn’t mean...”

“First time I’ve ever travelled with a real one.” He sniffed. “You try to go straight and see what happens. I’ve been clean for thirty years now. Decide to take a trip from Vancover to Seattle, and what do the arseholes do?”

I shrugged.

“Fucking extradite me.”

“What for?”

“They checked my FBI records.”

Maurice could see the scepticism in my face, as I began to wonder if he ever went to Canada at all. He fixed me with a piercing gaze.

“Sorry, “ I said. “I’m not doubting you. It’s just the FBI. It’s like Watergate, Silence of the Lambs. You know. Why would they be interested in you?”

“Maybe because I was banged up in Brixton for seven years for bringing half-a-ton of Morrocan Gold into Brockleigh Salterton.”

“Shit, half-a-ton of hash?”

“The best shit you’ve ever fucking had, man. That was how we got caught. We were all so fucking stoned, we crashed the catamaran into this geezers yacht. And then Jacko, the mad cunt, decides to lash out at the guy. Next thing we know the beach is crawling with fuzz. Mind you, it took five of the fuckers to pin me down. I reckon that’s why the judge did me for all those years. I hit one of them with a branch.”

“A branch?”

“Well, I ran off into the woods up by the cliffs you know.”

“Yea, I know, over the far end of the beach there, up towards the coast path”

“Yea man, I slipped and the fuzz were all over me. Fucking five of them on me fucking chest. So I’m going, ‘I can’t breath, I can’t fucking breath’. And the stupid cunts let me get up before they could get the cuffs on, and I just suddenly squirm away from them and pick up this fucking eight feet of beech, and smack this one round the fucking head with it. Knocked him out cold.”

“Well...” I said.

“I know, I shouldn’t have done the guy. He was just doing his job. But there was no need for five of the fuckers to stand on me. And seven years just for trying to make people happy. Fuck me, I would have got less for killing someone. You ever been banged up?”

I shook my head.

He pointed his finger at me and his eyes turn black as imploded stars

“Well I fucking tell you man, don’t ever do it. You ever get in that situation you stick you tongue so far up the judge’s arse it’s coming out of his ears.”

“I’ll bear that in mind,” I said.

“Hey,” he said. “I’m not fucking joking.”

I raised my hands.

“I believe you.”

He nodded. And I could tell what he was thinking – I was just some overprivilged little shit who for a few weeks once had a bleached mohican and wore a jacket with an A for Anarchy painted on the back, but now always waited for the little green man to tell him it was OK to cross the road. And, of course, he was right. But, I was still interested in his story.

I knew of a couple of small time dealers who peddled a quarter of hash or a couple of Es from pub car parks and night club toilets. There was even a tower block in Westing where they had the stuff laid out on a little table in the lobby, overseen by a couple of Jamaicans with tracksuits and handguns. But I’d never met a real life drug smuggler before. And Maurice’s story had that ring of truth. Why else would he have hidden himself away at the Daffodil Lion for all those years, unless he was hiding from something (outstanding arrest warrants, vengeful gang members, some Mr Big who lost thousands on the shipment that never arrived)?

“So how did you come to be sailing a yacht full of hash into Westing?”

“Well, that is quite a story.”

“Well, I’ve got quite a lot of time.”

I looked at my watch. It said twenty-past-four. The screen of trains times showed the first Westing Service wasn’t due until six fifteen.

“Do you fancy some coke?” I asked, deliberately phrasing the question so that I could quip. “A can, that is - from the machine on the platform?”

Maurice shook his head in disgust.

“Full of sugar. Rots your teeth.”

“I’ll get diet.”

“Full of chemicals.”

He could see what I was thinking.

“I don’t do artificial. Just don’t do it man. A bit of hash. That’s OK. It’s made by nature. Not in some huge fucking factory. You just sew the seeds and smoke it. It’s in harmony with your body, yea? A tin of soup’s got more shit in it. Look at the label. It’s chemicals, all chemicals man. You’re better off cooking up a few ‘shrooms.”

He paused, eyes glazed, as if reliving some memorable trip.

“I never did that much anyway. Even back then. Not that much. I mean, you gotta try before you buy, yea? That’s the trouble with the dealers these days. They’re businessmen, not enthusiasts. That’s why there’s so much shit shit around. We fucking smoked the stuff. If we didn’t like it, we never fucking bought it. So, yea, I did a bit of blow and the mazarine. But I swear that’s all.”

“Mazarine?”

I imagined it was some kind of seventies tranquilliser, long since withdrawn from the market due to it’s psychotropic side effects.

“Ah the Mazarine.” His eyes lit up and he smiled, a great huge smile of contentment like an old man imagining his first love. “Mazarine.”

And before I could ask him what it was, he began to tell me.

“We were in this band right? The Lemonade Lizards. We were on at the Roundhouse with the Floyd and the Crazy World of Arthur Brown. Had a single in the charts, went top ten in December 66, Come into my Magic Garden.” He started to hum a tune, suitably sixties and psychedelic. “People think the Floyd were the biggest thing around. But our album would have out sold them easy. The cats went crazy for us. Really crazy. Then this guy from the BBC comes to see us at the Half Moon. Tells us he’s gonna make us bigger than the Monkees with our own TV show and everything.”

“What did you play?”

“Drums, man.” He mimes a paradiddle. “Ain’t touched them for years now. But back then I was fucking good. We were going to be bigger than the Rolling Stones. And we could have been, if it hadn’t been for the fucking BBC.” He looks at me. “Do you pay your TV licence?”

“I nod.”

“Well don’t man. They’re a bunch of fucking Nazis.We end up in this studio up Shepherd’s Bush, right. And they’ve made us these fucking lizard costumes. And first of all we went along with it. Everyone was dressing up in them days. It’s like Jimi said to me...”

“Hendrix”

Maurice looks at me witheringly and continues.

“Like Jimi says to me, the whole world’s gimmicks man, Vietnam, napalm, ain’t nothing but gimmicks man. So, yea we went along with it. And then they give us this bike - a giant motorbike with a sidecar with green bumpy plastic all over it, like a huge fucking cauliflower on wheels.”

“Lemonade bubbles” I said.

“What?”

“The big plastic bumps like a cauliflower, they were meant to be lemonade bubbles, right?”

He considered this for a moment – as if in the past thirty-years this possibility had never once occurred to him. Then he shook his head.

“No, it was more like a cauliflower.” He paused again. “Yea, definitely a cauliflower. Anyway…, “ he continued, “we was supposed to be driving around having these crazy adventures. Then they have this meeting one day and we’re all sat round this table, us in our lizard costumes and them in suits, exept for this one cat with a flowery scarf and a little beard like Alan fucking Ginsberg. He starts going on about how they’re gonna aim the show at young kids, and how it’s got be educational if we want to get it funded and like we’ve gotta take out any mention of drugs. And we’re sitting there in fucking ten foot high lizard suits, stoned out of our boxes, going ‘yea, man, whatever.’ Man we put off recording our album to make this show, and suddenly everything goes totally fucking Sesame Street. They’ve got us doing the fucking alphabet and building things with these square kind of cushions with numbers on. And we keep putting the numbers in the wrong order, because we can hardly see out of these fucking lizard heads. And then we start doing it wrong on purpose and the guy in the scarf is getting angrier and angrier. Then Ginger our guitarists takes off his lizard head and lights up this huge fucking spliff. And the guy shouts at him, ‘Put that out and put that head back on or you’re fired.’ And we all look at each other and get on the cauliflower trike and drive off. And these guys in suits are running after us through the car park. But they’ve lifted the security gates to let in some guy in a Bentley, and we’re out on the streets driving through all these big red London buses and black taxis, waving at everyone, who think we must be filming some kind of show. And then we decided to head out onto the A4, and before we know it we’re fifty miles away, parked up at a pub in this place by the Thames called Pangbourne, which is where that guy got the idea for writing Wind in the Willows.”

“The Swan?”

“Yea, that’s it man the fucking Swan, lizard suits and all, sitting in the sun sipping beer and dripping sweat.”

He basks in the memory for a moment, and I ask:

“So, what did you do next?”

“Well Ginger tells us about this secret commune he’s heard of in Westing, somewhere up in the hills, where they’re are loads of chicks and everyone just fucks and gets stoned all day. And we decide - yea, man, we’ll go and find that place! So we fill up the cauliflower at this BP station, and keep going down the A4 through Theale and Newbury to Marlborough, looking out for fuzz the whole way, and then head off down towards the coast.”

“Still wearing the lizard costumes.”

“That’s all we had with us man. That and a big bag of weed. We’d decided we were just going to try and find this place, just for kicks, get laid, then torch the trike and those stupid costumes, hitch back up to London, tell the BBC to fuck off, start gigging again and finish making the album.”

“How did you know where this place was?”

“Well, Cliff the keboard player had a map that this chick had drawn for him in eyeliner on the back of a paper bag. But none of the roads had names, and it was getting later and later, and the lanes were getting smaller and steeper and we kept on having to get off the cauliflower and push it up these hills. And me and Ginger were pissed off. But Cliff was convinced we were getting near this place. It was the middle of summer, so we just just kept on smoking more and more weed and kind of went along with him. Finally we ended up in the middle of nowhere on this lane with really steep banks twenty feet tall, and stones covered in moss and masses of white and violet flowers. And Cliff keeps saying, ‘this is it, man, this is really it.’ And we thinks he’s totally lost the plot. But we’re too stoned to care. Finally this road turns into a gravel track, and it’s really late, and we have to slow down to follow this badger which is just taking a stroll in the moonlight and doesn’t seem bothered that there’s three fucking lizards on a motorised cauliflower behind it. And then, suddenly the track curves to the right, and we drive off the end of it and we’re on the edge of this huge quarry, and we look down and all we can see is this grey lake and a lot of rocks and all these tippees, like something out of a Cowboys and Indians film. And right it the middle is this huge tent decorated with peace signs and buddhist swastikas. Man, it weren’t the way Cliff described it to us. We thought it would be like streams and fields full of ‘shrooms, but Cliff was convinced there were chicks down there and we had not other place to go, so we thought it might be a blast. We followed the edge of the quarry round until we reached this one path blocked by a stockade kind of covered with barbed wire and Ginger says. ‘Christ this is like Abergavenny meets Auschwitz!’ (He’d been to some kind of hippy place up there - Mid Wales that is, not Poland). We drive up to the barrier and there’s this biker sitting up in this tree house thing at the top of the stockade, snarling down at us. He’s a real mean 300 pound digger. He’s dressed in camoflage gear, whittling away at a branch with a six inch commando knife. And he looks down at us on this cabbage in our lizard costumes.

Cliff says, ‘Hey man, How’s it going?’ And he doesn’t bat an eyelid.

So Ginger says, ‘Hey, we just want to come in and have a look round.’

‘Sure, you do,’ says the gorilla.

‘We’ve come a long way, man’ says Cliff.

‘All the way from lizard land,’ says the guy, but he still don’t smile.

‘Hey do you know Sally? We’ve friends of hers. We’ve had some wild times man.’

‘Sally’s been wild with a lot of people,’ the guy says. He laughs sarcastically and starts to whittle faster, until nothing is left of his stick.

‘Who are you cats anyway?’ I ask this guy.

‘Oh, the chosen few,’ he says.

‘So, who does the choosing?’ asks Ginger.

The man laughed again.

‘Oh, you know when you’re chosen.’

So Cliff starts to plead with this guy to let us in, saying we’re cold and hungry and all that homeless crap.

And I just grab this huge bag of weed from the back of the cabbage, and I says to the gorilla, ‘Hey do you take Moroccan Express?’ and I throw it up to him.

He sticks his head in the bag and breathes in real deep.

‘That’ll do nicely,’ he says. He jumps down and undoes these ten padlocks on the gates and pushes it wide open.

‘Welcome,’ he says, and we ride past him on the cauliflower trike still in our suits, smiling and making peace signs, and he shouts after us, ‘ you weird lizard fucks.’

Cliff calls him a neandertheal, and Ginger starts moaning on about losing all his weed. But I was just glad we were inside and could find a tent to sleep in and maybe a little pussy.”

“And did you?”

“Did we? Man, you would not fucking believe what we found. When we got down to this tippee village, it was deserted. But we could hear this sound of drumming and like chanting coming from the big tent. So, we parked the cabbage next to a load of choppers and a couple of painted vans and went to investigate. Inside the tent, we found about thirty or forty people sat around a huge fire. The floor was covered in grass and reeds, with loads of pillows and mattresses and giant bean bags. Hanging from the roof were windchimes, mobiles and oriental paper lanterns, bigger versions of the ones we used to make at Christmas when we was kids. Beside the fire was a kind of shrine. It was a pile of rocks with a bronze Buddha on top next to a crucifix surrounded by candles and incense burners. And, get this, above it were these three fucking shrunken heads with crooked teeth and little black pony tails. I mean these were the real fucking deal, like something out of the Last of the Mohicans. And all round the edge of the tent they’d hung up these sheets with Indian images painted on them. When we walked in the tent, a couple of guys gave us these funny looks as we were still in the lizard kit, but most people just ignored us, like it happened every day. So we sit cross legged on these bean bags and watch about half a dozen guys, bare chested, beating away at drums. And suddenly a couple of birds have got up, pulled their kaftans over their heads, and started dancing away stark bollock naked. Then a guy gets his kit off and joins in, jigging around with this dark haired woman with masses of fucking pubes from her front entrance to her arse. Old Cliff used to call her monkey cunt, and I tell you, he wasn’t fucking joking. Then everyone else gets up and rips their clothes off and they start to pass round this peace pipe. And suddenly Ginger takes a big toke on it, rips off his Lizard Costume and his Y-fronts, and starts jiggling his spotty white arse to the music.”

“What did you do?”

“I just had a smoke and watched. I was knackered. I don’t know what was in that pipe, but it blew my fucking head off. After a few minutes the tent was filled with smoke and everyone was completely out of it. And then a couple of people started to have it away, and everyone joined in, including Ginger. Well, me and Cliff had been to a few wild parties and that before, but nothing like this. There were cocks in mouths, tongues in pussies, blokes on top of blokes and women going down on each other. There was this one fat girl with massive knockers and she had a man sucking at each of them, whilst this other guy fucked her from behind like a fucking rabbit. Ginger was on top of these two birds who were kissing and fingering each other. But, then he was never fucking backward in coming forward. But me and Cliff, it wasn’t really our thing. Not with blokes and all. Not saying there’s anything wrong with it. But you know, not our cup of tea, not for a couple of working class lads like us. So we just went and sat outside by the lake laughing our fucking heads off.”

“So what happened after that. Did you stay?”

“For a while. Ginger was keen on a couple of the birds, well more than a couple. And they had guitars and bongos there, and when they found out we were the Lemonade Lizards, they wanted us to play our songs every night. And you know what it’s like, once the chicks find out you’re a pop star, they’re queing up outside your tippee.”

“What about your clothes. Did you walk around in the Lizard suits all the time?”

“Don’t be fucking daft, we ditched those straight off. Wore these kinds of robes. Everyone did.”

“So, it was one of these weird kind of religious cults.”

“I guess so. But I never found out what the fuck they were supposed to believe in. Some people reckoned the place had been set up by this draft dodger from the States, a guy who was half-American Indian. But we never saw any fucking sign of him. Others said the whole place had been started as a joke by some local farmer’s son.” Maurice cackled to himself. “What was it Cliff used to call it? Butlins on bad acid. And that was about it. The only thing anyone believed in was shagging and getting stoned. But that suited us for a few days.”

“So is that where you found this Mazarine stuff.”

“Yea, yea. I’m just getting to that. We’d been there for about a week, sat outside our tippee smoking weed, when suddenly there was this huge commotion at the stockade, and this motorbike comes haring down towards the lake. The gorrilla at the gate comes running after it holding this massive fucking machette. And this bloke gets off his bike, takes off his helmet and shakes his hair loose, and he is a she, the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen - just beautiful, long blonde hair and a face like a young Bardot, wide lips the colour of guavas and these dark eyes like half-moons.” Maurice paused and went all misty eyed.

“So what did the gorilla guy do?”

“Nothing. He just stops dead in his tracks, like he’s turned to stone. Then she unzips the front of her leathers and she’s stark bollock naked underneath, with this tattoo of a snake running up her stomach. The snake has got two heads, each with a really long tongue, licking at her nips. The machette just dropped out of the gorilla’s hand. And I realise I’ve seen seen her somewhere before.”

“Where?”

“There was this club, right, called the Cleopatra Club. It was the most notorious club in Soho at the time, in a basement off an alleyway beside a bookies. From the outside, you’d never know it were there. But inside it was like a fucking palace. And all the faces used to hang out there. It was impossible to get in unless you were connected.”

“So how did you get in?”

Maurice gave me a look. I smiled apologetically.

“I didn’t mean you wouldn’t get in. But, how did you find out about this place.”

“It was when we were in the charts. We were on Ready, Steady, Go and we did this photoshoot for the cover of NME, and afterwards the photographer says to us, ‘Do you want to go to this really happening joint? It’s a real blast!’ And we were like, ‘Yea, man, cool.’ And then he warned us there were some heavy dudes down there, so we had to just act real cool and not stare at them. And we were like ‘OK man’. So we did some blotters and got this cab down to Soho. He led us down this alleyway and there was this big black metal door with a tiny little letter box in it. The photographer squats down and says something through the letter box, and the door opens about six inches and we all squeeze in. And there’s these five or six gorillas in monkey suits, who look us up and down and frisk us, and then they wave us through these curtains. It was like walking into Aladdin’s cave with gold everywhere. It was a cross between a Pharoah’s tomb and the reptile house at London Zoo. There was this python wrapped around a Sarcophagous, all green and gold stripes, and loads of other Egyptian shit and tanks full of scorpions. In one tank, there was this big black rattler slithering over a chunk of plaster with all that Egyptian writing on it, and loads of girls wandering around with black wigs and gold skirts and not a lot else on, and all these people sitting back on these kind of Egyptian sofas.”

“Like chaise lounges?”

“Yea, that’s them. And the people in there! It was like Madame Tussauds come to life - Chamber of Horrors included. There were gangland villains, guys from bands, actors, footballers, politicians, and this boxer Terence ‘lightning’ O’Donahue who’d just won the world light heavyweight title the previous night. It was amazing. And the whole time, we’re tripping as well. And just when I thought I couldn’t be blown any further away, Trudy appears on this little stage.”

“The girl from the lake.”

“Yea. And get this - she’s wearing this army uniform, which has been dyed flamingo pink, complete with matching cap. She’s got on these knee high pink suede boots and she’s carrying a strawberry coloured rifle. And by the side of the stage, there’s this three-piece combo - guitar, drums and keyboard, just like the Lizards - and they start laying down this really bluesy, groove. A screen drops down behind the girl and they start projecting this light show of exploding oils across her body. And her skin’s really pale and white, so it looks fucking amazing. She slowly starts to unbutton her tunic to reveal her double-headed snake tattoo and her breasts are huge and her nipples are poking out like a couple of black cherries, with pink petals drawn all around them. Then, still wearing the unbuttoned jacket, she turns so her back to the audience, and bends over to touch her toes and moves her arse in time to the groove, and pulls up her skirt to show off this tiny pair of pink knickers, and everyone is like fucking riveted.”

“I’m not surprised.”

“Yea man, you could see her slit poking out and her starfish and everything. Then she turns to face the audience, dances to the edge of this little stage, and with her jacket hanging off one shoulder, she places the sole of her right boot on the bald head of this guy with a bow-tie (who I later find out is some cabinet minister). Then she takes her rifle, licks the barrell, and starts to slide it in and out between her thighs. And the sweat is pouring of this guy’s bald head. And Terry Donahue, the boxer, shouts out. ‘I hope that thing ain’t loaded, love.’ And the whole place fucking falls about. I mean, if anyone else had said that, they would have probably ended up in the fucking Thames. But then the place falls quiet again, and she finally slips off her jacket, so she’s wearing nothing but her boots, her cap and those panties. Then one of the girls with the black wigs and the gold skirts, hands her a champagne bottle. She grips it between her thighs and starts to stroke the stem up and down as she thrusts back and forth, slowly unwinding the foil and easing out the cork. There’s this bang. Women shriek. Champagne squirts everywhere. Some of these heavy characters have got soaked, and are looking daggers at her. But she just blows them a kiss and licks the froth from the mouth of the bottle. Then she pours the rest of the froth over her breasts and dangles them over the guy with the bald head. He just turns away, but she ain’t letting up. She rubs some froth into her panties and raises her eyebrows, like she wants him to lick it off. He’s squirming on his seat and looking at the floor, and everyone starts booing him and shouting stuff out and volunteering themselves.

The band stops, and we think its the end of the act. But then they start playing this kind of snake charmer music and Trudy walks over to this case and lifts out a python, drapes it round her neck and steps back up onto the stage. The snake is slithering all over her. And before you know it, she’s knelt down on the stage, spread her thighs, leaned back and this snake is heading towards her panties. And I kid you not, it goes in head first, and there’s a bit of a commotion next to us. A couple of women have to be helped out of the room, because they’re about to faint. Then, when this python is half way inside her she gets up, bends over and starts waving her arse about like she’s got a fucking tail. Everyone applauds, like they were at the Royal Variety Performance. She pulls this snake slowly out of her, does a little bow, and takes it back to its tank. And, as it slithers away, it gets all covered in sand like a breaded eel.”

“Weird.”

“Yea, fucking unforgettable, I can tell you. So when I see her get off that motorbike down in the quarry, I know straight away it’s her.”

“So, like you went and said hello and she gave you this Mazarine stuff?”

“Naa. I didn’t really know her, see. What was I supposed to say? How’s your fucking snake?”

“Well it’d be a start.”

Maurice looked at me, as if to say, ‘Do you want to hear what happened next or not?’

“Go on,” I said. “It’s really interesting.”

Maurice continued.

“Next morning I’m up early walking around the lake with this Welsh guy, who everyone called big Taff, and I see Trudy coming towards us through the mist, stark naked as usual. Like a fucking angel she was with her hair flowing in the breeze and a necklace of tiny pink and blue shells and those flowers painted around her nipples. I couldn’t take my eyes off her. And as she gets close, I smile and say ‘hello’ and she just walk past me like I wasn’t there.

I turn to big Taff and say, ‘Fucking snooty bitch, who the fuck does she think she is?’

He says, ‘cool it bro’, it’s the Mazarine, see, she don’t know you’re here.’

And I says to him ‘Mazarine?’

‘You didn’t know about it?’ he says.

And I shake my head.

He says, ‘Sorry man, I shouldn’t have said nothing.’

And I says to him, ‘Well, you’ve got to tell me man. What is this stuff?’”

Maurice pauses.

“So what was it?” I ask.

“What was mazzy? Man it was a fucking fairytale. On Mazzy you saw, you tasted, you smelled a different time, a different place. It wasn’t addictive, but when you were on it, you weren’t on the same planet.”

I laughed, and was tempted to ask Maurice if he was on it right then, after all that crap he’d told me. But I just asked politely:

“So what is this stuff? Where did it come from?”

“Now, that’s just what I asked Big Taff. He just smiles and says, ‘Do you want to come on a Mazzy Hunt?’ I had nothing better to do, so I says, ‘OK’. Then he says, ‘But you must keep this to yourself. Because if you tell anyone, we will have to kill you.’ And I don’t think he was fucking joking. So, I borrows some trousers and boots, army surplus stuff, and goes with him up to these woods near the edge of the forest. He’s carrying a rucksack and all these little plastic bags and a penknife. And I ask what are we looking for.

And he turns to me and says, ‘Larix cathartica, the Druid’s Larch’.

He explains it’s this really rare tree that they used to use to cure the sick. They’d scrape the bark from it and feed it to people who were ill, and they’d make a miraculous recovery. But, Big Taff, says, it weren’t the tree it was the fungus that was growing on it that cured people. He studied it at college or something. Big Taff said the tree was mentioned in these old medieval manuscripts, but all the professors thought it was a myth. So, he went out looking for it, and found it. That’s why he was funny about telling anyone. He reckoned the trees were sacred and he didn’t want big pharmaceutical companies coming and fucking around with them. Any how, we walk through the woods until we’re right in beneath the trees. It’s all dark and damp and he stands there sniffing the air like someone’s just farted.

I says to him, ‘What are you doing?’

‘Smell that?’ he says.

But, I couldn’t smell nothing. It was just like an old compost heap. So I says to him, ‘All I can smell is death and decay.’

He just nods and keeps on walking.

Then we come to this tree that’d fallen down creating a small clearing. Light shines down on us and there’s a bit of grass and bracken and a few brambles, and I sit on the edge of this tree as Big Taff climbs all over it. Then he spots some horrible brown slimy things on this rotten branch and chops them off and puts them in a one of his little plastic bags. I says to him, ‘You’re not going to eat that are you?’ And do you know what he says to me?”

I shake my head.

“Soup,” says Maurice. “Then Big Taff lets out a little whoop because he’s seen one of those red toadstools with the white bobbles on it. And he pulls the whole thing up and puts it in another bag. Then we keep on walking deeper and deeper into the woods. It’s getting smellier and darker. And Maurice is looking up the whole time at the trees. And suddenly he stops.

‘There it is, brother,’ he says, ‘The Druid’s Larch,’ and he points to this kind of fir tree. Now, to me, it looks just like the rest of the trees, but Big Taff is getting really excited, and he gets down on his hands and knees and puts his head to the ground like he’s praying to Mecca. And he’s actually sniffing the ground like one of those truffle pigs. And suddenly he starts pushing all the pine needles out of the way and there’s this tiny little mushroom thing poking out of the earth. It’s a kind of lemon colour with speckles on it.

‘Is that it?’ I ask.

And Big Taff says, ‘This is it, man, Amanita xanthophallus.’

‘A whatus?’ I says. ‘It just looks like a little yellow cock to me.’

And that’s what it was, because xantho means yellow and phallus, well you know what that means. Big taff tells me this is the rarest fungus in Britain and this is the only place that you can still find it. Aparently the druids used to swear that it could transport you through time and space and show you visions of the future.”

“A kind of toadstool time machine,” I said.

“Kind of,” said Maurice. “Whatever, he wasn’t going to pull it up. He just cut a tiny triangle out of the cap and put it in a bag.

‘More soup?’ I says to him. He nods and smiles, and we start to head back to the quarry.

I ask him, ‘Isn’t all this stuff poisonous?’

He says to me, ‘It’s fucking deadly, man. If you ate that now, you’d have a headache, nausea, diarrhoea, kidney pains and convulsions…if you’re lucky. Most probably though you’d be dead.’

‘What you want it for then,’ I says to him.

‘I’m going to make soup.’ He says.

And I’m like, ‘But I thought you said it was poisonous.’

‘What’s poisonous?’ he says to me. ‘Everything and nothing.’

I look confused.

‘Paracelsus, man,’ he says to me. ‘Theophrastus Phillipus Aureolus Bombastus von Hohenheim.’

‘Who the fuck is he?’ I ask.

Big Taff tells me this guy was a fifteenth century Swiss doctor, the guy who invented modern medicine. His idea was that anything could kill you if you ate enough of it. But nothing would kill you if you only ate a tiny bit of it?”

I look sceptical.

“It’s like Paracetamol. You’ve got a headache, so you take one and you feel better. If you took a hundred they’d kill you. If you crushed up one tablet into a hundred little pieces, and just took one little crumb of paracetamol, it would have no effect at all. So, it’s as lethal as cyanide, but it’s as safe as sugar. It just depends how much you take. Well, Big Taff explains that this yellow mushroom is just the same. If you take too much it’ll top you. If you don’t take enough it does nothing. But if you take just the right amount it sends you on the most amazing fucking trip you’ve ever had. So, we go back to his tippee and he makes this kind of soup they called Mazarine. And what he does he makes this broth in one pan and boils up hot water in another, then he dilutes it down in a little bowl, one spoon of soup to ten spoons of water. Then he takes a spoonful from that bowl and puts it another bowl, and adds another ten spoons of water. You follow?”

I nod.

“Well, he’s got a row of about ten bowls, all a bit different, so he don’t get confused, and each one is ten time more dilute than the last. Then he starts drinking from the weakest one and gradually works his way up until he starts tripping.”

“What effect does this Mazzy stuff have on you?” I ask, intrigued.

“Well, it’s hard to explain exactly. It’s not like a normal trip. For a start everything you see is blue.”

“Blue?,” I said.

“Yea, like one of those old mucky movies. The first time I tried it, Big Taff asks me what I can see. I just says to him, ‘Everything’s turned blue man.’ And he gives me a big hug and says, ‘I knew it, man, you are one of the chosen ones.’ It didn’t work on everyone, see. You have to have the right enzymes in you to metabolise the chemicals in the soup.”

“Sounds freaky.”

“It’s really fucking freaky. When you’re on Mazzy, you don’t imagine things like giant spiders and eyeballs and all that shit. You just suddenly tap back into memories and you can see everything crystal clear, like the day it happened.”

“Like hypnosis?”

“It’s a fucking million times more intense than that. You can taste and touch and smell everything. It’s like you’re immersed in the memory. Like you’re eyes are staring in, not out. But it’s weirder than that. Like you’re under water and seeing everything through swimming goggles.”

“What kind of stuff did you see?”

Maurice’s eyes well up.

“The Hallowsmere Princess,” he says.

“Who was she?”

“She was a train, the pride of the Mid Western Railways. She was built the year I was born, 1937. And she was beautiful. We used to live out in Fettlington and, when we were toddlers, our mum would take us out into the fields to watch the Princess going past. You probably can’t remember steam trains?”

I skake my head.

“Before my time.”

“Well you have to appreciate this was nothing like the fucking shit you get these days, fucking boxes on wheels. These were works of art, sweeping curves all painted out in green and gold, and huge - one hundred and seven tons of pulling power as high as a house. Imagine that rushing past you when you were a tiny little kid. It was magical. And the guys who worked on the railway then, then used to treat her with pride, polish her at every station. We’d watch the Princess whoosh through the Hallowsmere valley like an emerald bullet, the sky and the trees reflected in her casing like a moving fairground mirror.”

“Sounds fantastic,” I said.

“It was.”

“So, that’s what you remembered on your trip, this train?”

“Yea, to start with. I could taste the smoke in my mouth and smell the foxgloves growing up the embankment and feel my mum’s hand on my arm. It was like I was there and then suddenly I was stood on Westing Station at the end of the war watching the Hallowsmere Princess groaning into the station. And fuck me what a sorry sight that was. Saddest thing I’ve ever seen. She’d been painted black and was covered in rust and grime. There was no one to clean her anymore. She looked like the uptured hull of a bombed frigate - like she’d been melted down and used to create her own coffin. A tomb on rails she was. I tell you, it broke my fucking heart to see her like that, to hear the screech of her brakes, and smell those clouds of stinking steam like posion gas. Then all the soldiers start coming up the station, like phantoms looming out of the mist. And I’m holding onto my mum, half-scared and half-excited about seeing my dad for the first time in five year. But he never shows. Everyone’s dad comes off the train except mine. And we’re waiting there with my mum and these two London kids, evacuees, Ruth and Anthony. Funny thing was, when they told us we were getting these evacuees everyone said they’d be covered in lice and wouldn’t know one end of a sheep from the other and would piss on the floor like pigs in a sty. But these two were posh as fuck, from Hampstead. They were OK, though. We used to have a right laugh blackberrying and watching the old Luftwaffe coming over the woods, singing away in the Nissan hut. But we was kids, we didn’t really understand. You don’t do you? Anyhow, we was waiting and waiting on this station, and I start booing my eyes out and my mum bends down and kisses my face. And I can smell the beetroot juice on her breath.”

“Beetroot juice?”

“That’s what she used to use instead of lipstick. Well, we wait and we wait and my mum tells us not to worry, and my dad would be here soon. She was still stood there when the train was gone. Kind of frozen, she was. And in the end I had to lead her away.”

“I’m sorry. Was your dad, you know, missing in action?”

“Was he fuck. He just met some tart in Dover, and decided to stay there. But my mother never talked about it. So I never met him again. But when I was on the Mazarine, sometimes I’d start looking for him in my mind. And a couple of times I found him. He was so real. His face, his eyes, the smell of his tobacco.”

“Must have been quite moving?”

“To be honest, it was like meeting an old girlfriend. You know what I mean? The first time there’s this little spark. But the next time it’s like the fire’s dead, and you don’t care if you ever see them again. That’s what it was like meeting dad on the Mazarine. After a couple of times, I stopped looking. There was nothing there for me.”

Maurice was quiet for a couple of minutes then and we both stared up at the departures screen. The darkness was lifting outside on the platform. But the first Westing train was still forty minutes away.

“What happened to Trudy. Did you ever talk to her?”

“I did more than that.”

I smile.

“Oh yea?”

“She wasn’t like people thought. If you’d seen her perform at the Cleopatra, you’d never guess how sensitive and gentle she could be. But she was always in control. You’d think someone who had a snake up them like that every night would have a chuff like Wokey hole. But I tell you what, the muscles she had down there, she could have diced carrots. Anyway, I ain’t talking about that. She was a lovely lady.”

“So what happened to you two then?”

“It was a time and place. Like living in a fucking bubble. It soon bursts. See life is like the Mazarine. It seems real. You can see it, taste it, touch it, but it’s all a fucking illusion. It’s all up here.” He tapped the side of his head. “That place wasn’t even a proper commune. They never grew anything or believed in anything. It was just a load of spoilt kids, fucking about for a few weeks in some hole in the ground. Those guys used to go on about revolution and free love and all that shit. But they never let in anyone who wasn’t rich or famous or with the scene. It was basically an outdoor version of the Cleopatra club. A lot of bored people with money to burn and barely a moral between them. Sure you could stay there even if you didn’t have money. You could leech off someone else, latch onto someone who was rich but plain, and enhance their kudos by draping them with your talent. You could be roving minstrels like me and Cliff and Ginger, or have that sexual aura like Trudy or take people on trips like Big Taff, or be a gorilla and offer a bit of security like the gate keeper. But we were all just spaced-out tarts. And in the end, it just becomes stale, like everything else, and then it starts to fall apart.”

“So what happened? Did you go back to London and make that album?”

“The music business is just another fucking game, and we’d missed our turn. By the time we got back, the scene had moved on. There were other players. Cliff moved to South Wales with some bird, and Ginger got into dealing.”

“What about you?”

“I did a couple of sessions, but I mostly worked on building sites.”

He sees the look on my face.

“I know what you’re fucking thinking. But it was OK. At least it was honest labour. You laid your bricks, they paid you your money, you spent it. And I liked the navvies. They were right characters. They could quote poetry at you while they nailed each other’s boots to the floor. They’d climb up on the roof of the hut, and piss down the chimey of the coal burner to gas everyone out. There was one guy called Kevin who would shit on his shovel as he worked and throw it over his shoulder. Then he’d scrub the shovel up till it were like a silver platter and cook a gigantic breakfast on it over the site fire. I’m not joking. Each morning he’d have a shovelful of kidneys and sausages and eggs and maybe a bit of mushroom. Then he’d shovel all day (pausing only for the occasional shit), drink a gallon of Guiness, sing a song, have a fight and fall asleep in a hedge. He was a good man. A good man. Should have stayed on the sites. Should never have taken up with Ginger again. But... “

A guard comes into the waiting room.

“Oi, I thought I fucking told you last week, this isn’t a fucking doss house.”

“Excuse me,” I say indingnantly. “I’m waiting for the Westing train.”

“No not you sir. This fucking waster. Now come on move it. This isn’t the bloody Salvation Army.”

I am about to offer to buy Maurice a ticket to Westing, give him a fiver for some breakfast. But he’s already started to shuffle out of the waiting room, swearing to himself.

The guards grabs him by the arm. “Come on get moving or I’ll get you fucking locked up where you belong”

Maurice shrugs him off and wanders away.

“The guard turns to me. Sorry about that sir. They should bloody shoot them.”

I was horrified.

“You can’t say that. He’s harmless. I know him. He used to work in a pub in...”

The guard rounds on me.

“Look it’s simple mate. This is a station not a fucking hostel. You don’t know what it’s like. We had a dozen of them in here one night. Pissing on the floor. Setting fire to the seats. Who do you think has to clear the mess up?”

“Maurice isn’t like that. You asked him to go. He was leaving. You didn’t have to grab his arm.”

The guard stares angrily at me.

“We’ve got passengers bloody frightened to come in here.” He sniffs the air. “And who could bloody blame them with this bloody stink.”

“I’m just saying, you didn’t have to grab his arm.”

The guard shook his head in a derisory way.

“You want to come and bloody work here mate, see what it’s like.”

“Whatever.”

I got up and walked out onto the patform. The guard followed and disappeared towards the ticket office still muttering to himself. I shivered in the cold, glanced up at the timetable and watched a rat nibbling rubbish at the edge of the tracks.

All fiction on this site is © Copyright Roger Frederick 2005 All Rights Reserved