Cuttin' Heads

5

5“Can I have a P please, Bob?”

“You should've went during the break, ya daftie,” Ross tells the contestant on the TV screen, adding an obligatory ba-boom-tish drum fill in the air for comedic punctuation. The old ones were the best.

“What P,” Bob Holness asks, “is a region of wilderness in South America, shared by Chile and Argentina?”

“That'd be Patagonia, Bob” Ross informs the immaculately groomed host.

The contestant - a bespectacled student in a horrendous yellow and purple knitted sweater – is completely baffled by the question. “Erm… Peru?” he ventures. Ross rolls his eyes.

“No, I'm afraid that's incorrect,” Bob tells the geographically challenged buffoon. “I'll have to pass it over.” He repeats the question to the opposing two-man blue team; a rather homely girl sporting a remarkable backcombed mountain of frizzy blonde hair and huge red hoop earrings, and a skinny guy with a day-glo pink tank top and a leonine mullet. Born in '89, Ross is always grateful he missed the questionable, often plain inexplicable fashion sense of the mid-eighties. The two-man team confer briefly, before Mullet Man confidently provides Bob with the correct answer, winning his team the princely sum of a fiver before selecting the next hexagonal segment of the game board. “I'll have a J please, Bob.”

“Good call, Billy Ray,” Ross says, sitting forward on his couch, hands going to his rolling board on the coffee table. Aldo and Luce are picking him up in about twenty minutes for the gig at the 13th Note. Time enough for a sneaky pre-show doob, which he rolls and enjoys as the vintage re-run of Blockbusters on the Challenge channel continues. After a shaky start, the hideously jumpered solo contestant in the white team manages to pull it back and makes it onto the Gold Run. Standing alone on the Hot Spot though, the pressure gets to him and he folds at the decisive moment like soggy cardboard, running out of time with only two correct answers. Crestfallen, he leaves the show with a grand total of eighty-five quid, an Oxford dictionary and Blockbusters branded cardigan and filofax.

Pleasantly stoned, Ross flicks over to Channel Four, and enjoys the seductively intellectual charms of Rachel Riley and Susie Dent on Countdown while he waits for Aldo and Luce to arrive.

His mobile rings, and Ross sees on the display it's Aldo. Crossing his small living room and looking out the window, he sees Luce's silver Nissan Micra idling at the pavement, seven floors below. The Tardis, they call her motor affectionately, on account of the number of times they'd managed to squeeze themselves, their instruments and a full backline of amps and drum kit into the small vehicle, seemingly in defiance of the laws of physics. Happily, there's no need for such logistical trickery tonight. The 13th Note has its own backline, including an old but serviceable Line 6 bass combo which he's used in other gigs.

Ross picks up his mobile and answers the call. “Alright, man,” he greets Aldo. “Be down in two secs.” He reaches for the TV remote. Countdown is just about finished, Nick Hewer about to reveal today's crucial conundrum. The famous thirty second jingle starts up as the letters appear.

E A R F U S I O N.

“Nefarious,” Ross says out loud, and like a boxer landing a knockout punch and strutting back to his corner before his opponent has even faceplanted into the canvas, he raises a fist in triumph and switches off the TV while the two contestants are still frowning at the jumbled up letters. He grabs his gig bag from the hall and leaves the flat, cheerily whistling the Countdown theme as he descends the graffiti adorned, hint-of-pish smelling communal stairway.

“Evening all,” he says as he climbs into the back seat of The Tardis. “How we all doing?”

“Not too shabby, dude,” Aldo says from the front passenger seat, looking over his shoulder. “Good day off?”

“Aye, sweet, man. Slept in till eleven, couple hours practice, spot of lunch, few reefers and a bit of telly. Did you know Harry Houdini's real name was Erich Weiss?”

“I did not.”

“You do now. How's tricks, Luce? Manage to press g**g your students into coming along tonight?”

“Aye, should be a few turning up,” Luce says as she fiddles with the car stereo. A moment later, The Tardis fills with the frenetic drums and low-frequency guitar fuzz of Kyuss, pressurising the small car's interior with vintage stoner rock.

“Good call,” Ross says, smiling and bobbing his head in appreciation as the car pulls away from the pavement.

He loves this part, the commute to the show, almost as much as he loves playing the gig itself. The free and easy banter with Aldo and Luce, the car throbbing with music and the lengthy, often animated discussions of said music's pros and cons. He loves watching the world go by outside, the pre-show excitement buzzing in his bones. That feeling of doing what you're happiest doing. The thing you're built for. Ross was well into his teens before he found any sense of belonging or purpose in his life, and a big part of the discovery had been in picking up a dusty old bass guitar.

It didn't even matter if the gig turned out to be near empty, as was often the case. Just last month they'd driven for over three hours to a gig up in Aberdeen and played a set in front of a heaving crowd of ten, consisting of the two barstaff, the sound guy, the other band on the bill, an old man passed out blitzed in the corner, and the scabby looking mongrel at his feet, who'd watched their set with disinterest between prolonged sessions of enthusiastic ball-l*****g. As disheartening as it could be, for Ross McArthur even things like that weren't enough to take away the joy of playing the gig and the road trip to get there.

He's looking out the car window, the streets and schemes of Inverclyde passing by a visual mismatch to the sounds of Kyuss on the stereo, music that makes Ross think of wide open places, burning sunshine and tumbleweed, and late night generator powered parties in the Californian desert. He can almost smell the w**d, sweat, beer and woodsmoke.

Inverclyde has its share of beer and w**d, and weather permitting, manages the occasional bonfire, but there, any similarity to the Californian desert rock scene ends. Passing outside the car window is a tired urban landscape of industrial estates, office developments and residential streets, many of them in advanced stages of decay, with most of the windows in the tenement blocks securely glazed with steel plates. It's an area in decline, with a dwindling population. The shipbuilding disappeared from the Clyde decades ago, with only one or two yards left along the riverbanks once world renowned for maritime quality. More recently, the computer industry that had replaced the shipyards and had kept the area afloat ever since the seventies had all but vanished, too. The big IBM plant they drove past outside of town was empty now. The mile-long strand of factories and offices nestled in the hills now just a big ugly scar in the greenbelt, wide empty patches of overgrown scrub and half collapsed industrial ruins, as if the demolition teams couldn't even be arsed with it, and had just left it to nature to finish what they'd started.

Heading for the M8 which will lead them to Glasgow, the Tardis skirts the Oak Tree Mall in the town centre. Ever since what experts liked to call the 'financial downturn' of recent years, businesses that had been established in Inverclyde for decades had closed down one after the other. Their spaces in the mall now filled with cheap emporiums, card shops and pawnbrokers, many of which would themselves be closed before the next tax year. Gone were local institutions like Rhythmic, the wee record shop where Ross had bought his first Black Sabbath vinyl and the ticket to his first concert (Dropkick Murphys at the Barras, St Patrick's Day, 2006. Carnage.) and Mungin's Tailors, where Gregor, Ross's foster father, had seen him kitted out with a suit for his first job interview after leaving school. The suit had seemed to do the trick, and he'd got the gig, had done his time on the headset circuit doing customer service in one of the offices at the now defunct IBM plant. He'd worked in the same team as Aldo, who was bagged a few weeks later after phoning in 'sick' for the eighth time in three months.

“How's the job hunt going, Al?” he asks now. It's been three days since he got bagged from the market research place. It was always going to happen. Aldo just wasn't the type to last in that type of job. Couldn't keep his brain turned off long enough. Repetitive call centre work could be serious brain damage, especially for a guy like Aldo, who was smart enough, but a creative to the core. Problem was, with no useful qualifications to speak of, and no employable skills outside of music, it was one of the few types of work Aldo could hope to get.

“Shite,” Aldo says. “Been checking S1, Indeed, the Jobcentre, all the usual sites, all the usual pish. Even the customer service ads are only after Finnish and Norwegian speakers. I've sent applications out for a few bar and outbound sales jobs. Registered with the agencies. Not heard anything back yet. Anything going at your places?”

“Sorry, mate,” Ross says. “Checked the vacancy board in the hospital, but bugger all.”

“Nothing at the college either,” Luce says. “Unless you're an HR administrator with two years' experience and a degree, or a time served electrical engineer?”

“Mmmm… nope.”

“Ach, chin up,” Ross goes, giving him a slap on the shoulder. “You never know, mate. This could be the gig the A&R guy from Sony shows up waving blank cheques around. Did you know Rod Stewart was discovered when a record company guy heard him singing to himself on a train station platform?”

“I did not.”

“You do now.”