Goodnight Steve McQueen by Louise Wener Page B

This is all wrong. I wonder if Kelly has ever had athlete’s foot. I wonder if Ike has shagged her yet.
    “OK, that’s fine,” she says, smiling at me with a mouthful of expensively whitened tooth enamel. “Someone will be up to collect you in a minute.”
    I sink into a long leather sofa and flick through one of a pile of Music Week magazines that are stacked up on the table next to me. I feel like I’m in the waiting room of a millionaire music mogul turned evil suburban dentist: Brian Epstein meets David Geffen meets Laurence Oliver in Marathon Man. I think about pretending to be Dustin Hoffman by stuffing some tissue paper in my cheeks, and asking Kelly if it’s ‘safe’, but I don’t think she’d get it. It’s
    at least ten minutes before anyone bothers to come up and collect me.
    The practice room itself is the size of a small aircraft hangar. It’s got a raised wooden stage at one end and an overhead lighting rig illuminating piles of amps and guitars and drum cases at the other. Scarface are still on stage. Ike is throwing messy rock poses with his guitar while his tour manager barks a complicated series of instructions at his team of roadies and press officers and assistants and glorified hangers-on. One of the road crew fat gut, stocky limbs, scrappy dragon tattoos etched into his freshly shaven head is crouched over at the side of the stage making a tray of joints for the band. He’s like a machine: rolling them up, licking their seams, rolling them up, licking their seams, rolling them up, licking their seams, fitting them with roaches and dotting them about on the band’s equipment like sweets.
    Ike sees me come in and gives me a quick nod. He leans over, selects the fattest joint he can find, jumps down off the stage and strolls over to slap me on the back. Hard.
    “Moony, duuuude… long time no see. Long fucking time.”
    “Hi, Ike,” I say, ‘you’re looking well.”
    “Cheers, yeah… but look at you, man… look at you… still exactly the same … I mean, really, Moon, you haven’t changed a bit since school. Not one little bit.”
    “Well… I’ve seen you a few times since then, Ike. Remember when you were off to post that Jiffy bag to the Melody Maker that time?”
    “No. Not sure what you mean. Was it a demo tape or something?”
    “No, it was a turd.”
    “Oh yeah,” he says, taking a long toke on his spliff. “I remember. That was cool, man. That was one stinky fucking turd.”
    Ike lifts the spliff back to his lips and inhales deeply. I notice that he holds the smoke in his lungs for as long as he can. I notice that he plucks his eyebrows and that he wears chipped
    black varnish on his fingernails. I notice that his hand shakes a little as he pulls the butt from his mouth and passes it back to his roadie.
    “Right then,” he says, ‘that’s better. Now we can go up to the cafe for a bit of a chat.”
    Ike has a severe case of the munchies so we head over to the serving hatch and join the food queue. Ike orders shepherd’s pie and peas. And a plate of spotted dick and custard for dessert. I’m not feeling that hungry so I settle for a mug of tea. And a packet of Hula Hoops. And a small slice of pie.
    We spend the next half-hour making idle music-business banter and pretending that we’re both interested in what each other has been up to for the last five years. He’s exactly how I expected him to be: full of himself. He’s got a skewed mid-Atlantic accent that keeps lurching into ‘dudes’ and ‘mans’ and ‘sure things’ and then crashing back into comedy Dick van Dyke mockney. He can’t stop bragging: the places he’s been to, the people he’s met, and he’s sipping his tea and stirring his custard and spilling their names like party wine and waste paper.
    “Of course, Madonna,” he says, leaning in low over his mince, ‘has got fantastic tits… for her age … I mean, she’s a bit long in the tooth, yeah? But she’s definitely a nice bit of old.