I Wanna Be Yours (9781760984342) by Clarke John Cooper

Author:Clarke, John Cooper
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pan Macmillan Australia Pty

Chapter Forty-One

HERO STEW

One night in early 1975, Steve Maguire turned up at my place above the hippy shop. Here was a guy with a broken heart: apparently he and Helen had broken up. It was her idea.

Helen and Steve had always seemed to me like the perfect couple. I naturally tried to reassure the kid: you’re just going through a bad patch; maybe she just needs her own space for a while; she’ll be back – all of that noise. But he was inconsolable. Who wouldn’t be?

He invited me to move into their apartment in Sedgley Park near Prestwich. It occupied the entire first floor of a large Victorian villa, and I think he needed someone to help out with the rent and we were pals. I was working at Salford Tech and trying to hack it in the clubs, so I had a bit of disposable, which was just as well because Steve’s cash-flow was always erratic.

Steve was still a student at the Manchester School of Art, but he was always under the cosh there. The way he saw it, he was the lone practitioner of representational art in an increasingly abstracted city, and those deconstructionist motherfuckers were always trying to kick his ass the fuck out. He was only hanging on in there by virtue of several psychiatric reports and a couple of high-profile character references. One of them was from his favourite tutor, Ted Roocroft, a Cheshire pig farmer turned painter and sculptor, a fellow realist, later to be justifiably acclaimed as ‘the Michelangelo of wood’.

Steve’s backstory involved pep pills and marijuana. He had no significant history with booze. His chosen tipple up to this point was the snowball, a lady’s drink, the main ingredients of which were Babycham and advocaat. But now he had turned into an out-and-out beer monster for the best reasons known to man, as most records by George Jones would attest. Although he didn’t fit the Dylan Thomas definition of an alcoholic, ‘Somebody you don’t like who drinks as much as you do’, if anybody could be said to be one it was Steve. It was glug glug glug: I don’t know where it all went because he somehow maintained his featherweight status through all the years I knew him.

Public houses didn’t chime with my idea of myself. By the time I was eleven, I was familiar with most of the pub interiors of my immediate neighbourhood, and had haughtily decided they were strictly for schlubs. Even so, I wasn’t much help keeping Steve out of licensed premises. I’d accompany him on his increasingly frequent outings to his local – the George on Bury New Road – but I couldn’t keep up with him. I’ve always had a problem with beer; it’s largely anatomical, in that I lack the physical capacity for the volume necessary to alter my mood. One pint and I’d have to go for a piss and a nap immediately.

I wasn’t seeing so much of Liz at this point.

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