The Church and the Tradesman - 2. The Brat

“Oh my God, who the fuck are you?” he said, “did you just swim here or something?”

I recognised his face straight away, he looked exactly the same as he appeared on TV, although I usually switched channels whenever I saw him.

‘I don’t believe it…Tyrone Spencer’!

He was one of the most recognisable faces in pop music at the time and you would have had to be living under a rock not to know who he was, yet his name never entered my head when I was putting together a list of potential celebrities. I thought that it would be someone more established; Prince, Madonna maybe, but this was just a kid who could dance, with an annoying squeaky voice and a collection of sickly teenage love songs that all sounded the same. He had made it big over the past year, but I never imagined that he would be lined up for a Brit Award.

“Err…I’m working on the plumbing,” I said, offering an explanation that wasn’t really necessary. I thought that I might have frightened him at first as he stared at me from his lofty position halfway up the big staircase. He was wearing a bright red, puffy ski jacket and a blue woolly hat, with a white bobble on the top. He looked ridiculous, but he obviously thought that I looked even worse and he found it highly amusing as he looked me up and down and laughed.

“Did you fall into the toilet?” he said. “You’re wet!”

I try to avoid sarcasm, but sometimes it’s not easy and I looked down at my drenched clothing as if I hadn’t noticed. “It’s raining!” I said.

“No kidding, this is England, right? Don’t move.” He had a tiny digital camera, which he held up to take my picture. “This is too funny,” he said, but I wasn’t so sure that I liked being the brunt of his little joke and I didn’t particularly like having my picture taken looking such a mess.

I turned towards the stairs that led to the basement as he studied the photo that he had just taken and chuckled, but as I walked away, he called me back. “Wait, where are you going?”

“Downstairs,” I said. “To fix the boiler, remember?”

“Are we gonna have some hot water soon?”

“Yes.”

“Hong long?”

“I dunno, err…we don’t even know what’s wrong yet….”

He tutted and I hated it when people did that. “Well, hurry up!” he said. “I need a shower and it’s too cold in this house.” I couldn’t imagine how anyone could be cold under that coat. He looked as if he ready to go skiing, but I didn’t like the way that he talked to me.

‘Cheeky little shit, who does he think he is’?

“It’s February,” I muttered as I headed downstairs, but I shouldn’t have been surprised by his attitude. Whenever I had seen him on TV I always got the impression that he was a spoilt little brat. Not that I ever went out of my way to watch him, or listen to the candy-coated crap that poured from his mouth, but in those days it was sometimes difficult to avoid him. After topping the charts twice in less than a year, the media had fallen for his pretty boy looks and his picture was plastered everywhere, even on posters on the tube stations. I had probably passed him a dozen times already that morning, riding the escalator at Camden Town on my way to the firm.

My best friend Jazz, loved him, although I could never understand why. She thought that he was cute, but more like a puppy dog than sexy, and that was basically how he looked, with a big mop of blond hair hanging over his face. It was still a huge compliment though, coming from a girl who only ever slept with women and occasionally me. Whenever she crashed over, I would have to give up half of my bed to her. It worked well; neither of us had any carnal interest in the opposite sex, but she snored.

Tyrone Spencer created plenty of interest among both sexes, but he was far too girly and feminine for my liking, and in my opinion, too manufactured to have any real depth of talent.

When I reached the basement, Bob was on the phone; another bad sign. He rarely called his missis from the company mobile and he had no friends, so it had to be work related, which meant there was a problem.

I dropped the two heavy tool bags on the floor and studied my hands where the canvas handles had been digging into my fingers. Then I shook some of the rainwater off my hair, doggy style, and began combing it with my fingers as I watched Bob pace and circle the basement.

He turned to me shaking his head in despair. “Fucking idiot,” he said, covering the bottom of the phone with his hand and I assumed that he was talking to our boss, Sidney. I had explained to Bob several times how to mute a call, but he was still having trouble adapting to mobile phones. He went back to the call as I peeled off my wet jacket. The rest of my clothing would have to remain where it was, and there would be no heat until we fixed the boiler. I hated these days, when everything went wrong, especially if it was a Saturday when I couldn’t work late.

Saturday was my going out night and on Sunday morning it was church, the focus of my entire week. It’s what I lived for and the only thing that kept me sane. I couldn’t and absolutely wouldn’t miss it, not for anything in the world. Not even for a pretty boy American pop star.

There were rules to follow. To get into church on Sunday morning, you had to leave your house the night before. That was how it worked; the warm up was an essential part of the process, which couldn’t be skipped or tinkered with. The intensity of the church was such that you had to acclimatise your body in stages, before plunging into the crazed and frenetic world where nothing made sense and then simply letting go. That was ‘Trade’, a bizarre, highly addictive, and very exciting underground scene that simply trashed everything that went before it. Known to its members as ‘The Church’.

- 11 am -

The moment Bob ended his call, I was over him like a rash. “What’s wrong?”

“We’re gonna have to replace the whole boiler,” he said. It happened to us quite a lot, the pipes, valves, and fittings, were ancient relics from the pre-Euro age. They no longer manufactured the old sizes, because of the European Union all the sizes were now in metric, and that meant replacing everything.

“Not today, we haven’t got time. Have we?” I said.,

He pursed his lips and folded his arms and I knew that he had already agreed to do it. It would mean plenty of overtime, which Bob liked. Double-bubble for him and time-and-a-half for me, but I was more interested in finishing on time than an extra couple of quid in my wages. For Bob though, it was money that he always needed, and claimed he didn’t have, even though he never seemed to spend any.

“It’s a nightmare,” he said, but he was loving it really. Everything was a nightmare in his world; he absolutely thrived on those bad dreams, they were his bread and butter and this was fast turning into a perfect day for him. The next step would the inevitable phone call to his missis, to tell her that he would be late home. She was only five-foot-high and looked wider than she was tall, with a face like the back of a bus. It wasn’t surprising that he would rather work with me than spend quality time alone with his unfortunate spouse. I was no film star, but at least I looked human and I had a nice ass, which thankfully, went completely unnoticed by Bob, but got me a lot of attention at the church.

My usual Saturday night routine was now in danger of being disrupted and the alarms were already ringing in my ears. I was always at Jazz’s house by ten and we would leave at around midnight, depending on whereabouts we were going first. ‘Heaven’ under the arches at the Embankment, or maybe ‘The Fridge’ in Brixton. Both were popular gay venues and suitable for warming up, but nothing like the main event. The plan as always was to arrive at Turnmills in Clerkenwell, at 4 am, when the doors would open for ‘Trade’.

“You mean the poofy kid with the squeaky voice?” said Bob when I told him who the famous guest was upstairs. I was helping him disconnect and dismantle the existing and now thoroughly knackered boiler, while we waited for our boss Sidney, to drop off the new immersion heater that we were going to fit. Taking them apart was always much easier than the fitting, and to save time I wanted to have everything ready for when the new one arrived.

“He’s a rude little git,” I said.

“He’s as bent as a two bob note,” said Bob.

“I don’t know what a two bob note is Bob. I wasn’t born when they were in circulation.”

“They weren’t in circulation, that’s why they’re bent, dimwit.” I got the point and smiled. A bent note was a forgery and there was no such thing as a two bob note. “My missis likes him though. I’ll have to get his autograph before we leave, she’ll be chuffed.”

“Yeah right, good luck with that one,” I said. “He’s a little brat; I wouldn’t try to approach him if I were you.”

“What’s that song of his?”

“No, Bob. Don’t even think about it!”

“That’s it,” he started humming and I was horrified as he launched into the chorus of a song that had reached number one just a few months ago.

“Bob, please! He can probably hear you.”

‘This is so embarrassing’.

My grimy colleague did no justice to a song that wasn’t very good, to begin with, but the tacky repetitive chorus line stuck in my head for the rest of the day.

- Midday -

Bob needed a smoke and I needed to call Jazz, so I followed him upstairs and along the elegant hallway with its cut-glass chandeliers and beautiful oil paintings that caught my eye whenever I passed. That old house stunk of the British empire, hardly the place you would expect to find a teenage pop star, and maybe the reason why he was there.

When we reached the spacious living room, there he was, sitting or rather lying sideways across a big armchair watching TV. His legs were hanging over one of the arms and his head resting on a big cushion on the other. He had ditched his ski jacket but kept the bobble hat. On the floor in front of him was a big electric fan heater.

He would have heard us walking past, but he didn’t turn his head away from the television screen. “Did you fix it?” he asked.

“Not yet,” I said.

“Why not?” he demanded.

I wasn’t sure how to answer that question or if I even wanted to, so I left to Bob. “We have to replace the boiler,” he said.

“Haven’t you been doing that for the past hour…how long does it take?” Bob looked a little put out as he turned to me. I shrugged my shoulders and mouthed an expression to him that summed this kid up quite well.

“We’re waiting for the new water heater to be delivered,” said Bob, but his explanation was gradually drowned out by the voice of Angela Lansbury in ‘Murder She Wrote’, as the kid increased the volume until it was almost deafening.

‘Arrogant little prick’!

As we left the room he turned it down again, all without even turning his head. As soon as we were out of earshot, Bob had some choice words to describe our over-demanding pop star client, which I would have liked him to have heard, but Bob always seemed to lose his temper after the event.

When we reached the security room, we were stopped by the big South African. “Just one more thing boys,” he said. “The record company are worried about the press. You know who is staying here, don’t you?”

I nodded. “Tyrone Spencer,” I said and I could hear Bob still speaking his mind behind me.

“You’ve met him them?” said the guard with a chuckle.

“Unfortunately,” said Bob.

“He can be a real pain in the arse, but he’s big news at the moment, and the record company don’t want the press to find out where he is, that’s why he’s not in a hotel. If they find out he’s here, they’ll be all over this place. Like flies around shit.”

“So you want us to keep it quiet?” I said. I had no intention of calling the newspapers anyway.

“Just don’t talk to the press,” he said. “They know that we use this house, and they’re looking for him. If they see you working here, they may stop you and ask you about him. Or even offer you money to find out,” he said. “It’s no joke if word gets out, then you won’t even be able to get your van out of here. They hang from the trees to get their pictures.”

I knew what the English paparazzi were capable of. They would relentlessly track celebrities and the Royals like packs of hounds to snap a lucrative picture. It was big money and Tyrone Spencer was a big name.

“Look what they did to Diana,” said Bob. “They’re like wild animals.” Princess Diana had died in a car crash the previous summer, and many, including Bob, still blamed the paparazzi for her death. We agreed not to divulge the little brat’s whereabouts to the press, but I knew that I would have to tell Jazz.

‘She is going to be so jealous’.

My clothes were still damp from earlier, but when we stepped outside it had stopped raining. A temporary truce, more showers were forecast for this evening.

“It’s gonna piss down later,” said Bob. Then he took a deep breath of North London air and started coughing. “Bloody damp, in that basement.” I had to laugh. He had a wide range of readymade excuses at his disposal, to explain away his cough, but none was credible. Smoking twenty cigarettes a day for thirty plus years apparently had nothing to do with it. He wasn’t fooling me; his battered lungs had survived on a mixture of exhaust fumes and tobacco smoke for the best part of his life and would only get worse, but I was in no position to preach to him about his habits. I didn’t smoke tobacco, but that was the only thing that I didn’t smoke and only because it didn’t get me stoned.

I took drugs; street drugs or recreational drugs as I preferred to call them—it made them sound almost healthy—but only one or two days a week. Drugs were a part of the scene and inextricably entwined with the music. It was impossible to enjoy either one without the other. Everyone who went to church did drugs—mostly ecstasy—and there were dealers in every corner, with a varied selection. At busy times you would have to wait in an orderly queue to be served, and I had even seen people paying by cheque. More importantly, everything they sold was kosher and supposedly safe, or as safe as any illegal street drug could be.

The club had flourished by flying under the radar and for whatever reason, the powers that be, seemed to be willing to turn a blind eye, but drug-related deaths were a fast track to closure, and only known and trusted dealers were allowed to sell openly within the club.

The damage that these mind-bending drugs cause, both mentally and physically after prolonged use is undeniable, but they were the not-so-secret ingredients that fuelled the busy club scene of the nineties and the gay club scene in particular, of which ‘Trade’ was the pinnacle.

Jazz was one of my accomplices and I found a quiet spot on the driveway to give her a wake-up call. She was groggy when she finally answered.

“Have you only just got up, you lazy cow?”

“No, of course not,” she said and yawned. “I’ve been up for ages; what time is it anyway?”

“Liar. It’s three o’clock in the afternoon.”

“You’re fucking kidding me!” I could hear her scurrying around panicking and I laughed. “You’re a bastard!”

“Probably,” I said. “But you will never guess who’s staying at the house where I’m working?”

“How would I know?”

“You’re supposed to guess.”

“Tyrone Spencer?”

‘BITCH! How can she possibly know that’?

“How did you guess? I hate you.” There was a long pause and I thought that she might have gone back to bed. “Hello.”

“You’re joking, right? You have to be joking, tell me you're joking!”

“Jazz, slow down, you’re hyperventilating.”

“You're joking about Ty Spencer right,” she said and I laughed.

“I never mentioned him, you did, remember?”

“So he isn’t staying there,” she sounded disappointed.

“I didn’t say that either.”

“Arghhhhh, you are so annoying. Is he there or not?”

“Would you like to talk to him?”

“Don’t wind me up, Andy.”

“I doubt if he’ll want to talk to you anyway,” I said. “He’s a jumped up little squirt.”

“Are you seriously telling me that Ty Spencer is there with you?”

“No, he’s not here with me; I’m standing outside by the van. He’s in the house watching Tott’s TV.”

“You're a liar.” I was starting to lose patience; Jazz was my best friend but she could be hard work at times.

“Okay,” I said, “I’m lying. Later Jazz.” I ended the call and strolled over to Bob who was standing by the van goggling the tits on page three of the daily rag. A few minutes later the phone rang again. This time I didn’t even get a chance to say hello.

“Oh my God, you're serious aren’t you? He’s in London for the Brit Awards. I’ve just seen a picture of him arriving at Heathrow. He got here yesterday. Where are you working, I’m coming over?”

“No, I’m not telling you. You can’t just come over, it’s a private residence. They have security.”

“You can tell them that I’m your girlfriend or something. I know. You forgot your keys this morning and you asked me if I could drop them off to you at work.”

“Nice try sweetheart, but it won’t work. They’ll just ask you to leave them with security.”

“Arghhhhh, I don’t believe it. How come you get all the luck?”

“Jazz, I’m here to fit a boiler; it’s not a social visit. I don’t even like the little prick. Anyway, I have to go or Bob’s gonna be looking for me.” He was standing right beside when I said that, and he gave me curious look.

“Get me his autograph.”

“NO!”

‘What is she like’?

- 1 pm -

The new boiler was heavier than the one that we had just removed and it took the pair of us to carry into the house and downstairs to the basement, where Bob set everything up. We would have to take the original one away with us plus all the pipes, clamps and fixings that couldn’t be re-used and it was my job to carry all these to the van.

It meant having to pass my favourite pop star who seemed to have the attention span of a goldfish. Each time I walked through the living room laden with scrap metal, he was doing something different. First, he had a game console set up, a PlayStation, I think. The next time I passed him, he had a computer on a stand, with one of those big fat-arse monitors and he looked as if he writing emails. On my third flypast, I noticed him holding some kind of remote control in his hand and I could hear the high-pitched whine of a toy car, but I didn’t see it until it hit my foot. It was my final journey and I was carrying the bulkiest item—the outer casing of the old boiler that we had dismantled—so my vision was already partly obscured. I stumbled over the toy racing car, lost my grip and the boiler came crashing to the floor hitting the leg of a table, and tipping that over as well. There was a glass lamp on the table and I watched it fall almost in slow motion to the carpeted floor where it smashed into tiny pieces at his feet. It was the classic domino effect, but once in progress, there was nothing that I could do to stop it.

I stood up and surveyed the damage, before turning towards Tyrone, but he beat me to it. “What are you doing?” he shouted. “You stupid idiot, you could have hurt me.”

“You tripped me up!” I shouted back, but I could scarcely believe that he was shouting at me.

“Oh yeah, how did I do that you fucking jerk?” He looked at the mess around him. “Look what you’ve done, asshole!”

If I was expecting some kind of apology from this highly strung superstar, then I was obviously deluded because he clearly didn’t have it in him to interact civilly with anyone. I brushed myself down and shook my head as I saw the security guard approaching, he was followed into the room by a middle-aged woman, who ran over to Tyrone with a look of horror on her face.

“Are you okay, Tyrone.” She was an American.

‘Don’t tell me his mother’?