Stories We Could Tell Read Online Free PDF

– but Terry didn’t know the rules. How was he supposed to know you kept review copies? Until today he’d had to save up for any record he wanted.
    It was like everyone else was speaking a language he didn’t understand. He had a lot of catching up to do. Maybe too much. Maybe he would never catch up. And then he saw Misty’s face for the very first time. And then he really knew that he was out of his depth.
    One of the older guys parked Terry in the office he was to share with Leon Peck and Ray Keeley, the other young writers. Neither of them were there – Ray was at a Fleetwood Mac press conference somewhere in the West End, and Leon was on the road with Nils Lofgren. So while Terry waited for one of the older guys to find him something to do after finishing Be Bop Deluxe, he played with his typewriter, and looked in the drawers of his empty desk. And then he heard her, explaining something to the picture editor,and climbed on his desk to see the owner of that cool, confident voice.
    The office was divided by grey, seven-foot-high partitions that made up the individual offices. It looked like a corporate maze. But if you knelt on your desk you could see over the top of the partitions. Two offices down he saw her – shockingly gorgeous, although he could not work out why. It was something to do with the way she carried herself. But he felt it for the first time – the little swoon of longing.
    ‘I’ve gone for a look of emptiness and stillness,’ she was telling the picture editor. ‘I think you’ll find it’s redolent of the Gerard Malanga shots of Warhol and the Velvet Underground.’
    She had been taking pictures of Boney M.
    Together Misty and the picture editor were poring over her contact sheets, these glossy black sheets of paper with tiny photographs – Terry had never seen a contact sheet before – drawing lines in red felt-tip around the shots they liked, then finally choosing one image by placing a cross next to it. Like a kiss, Terry thought, knowing already that it was hopeless. She was way out of his league.
    ‘I know they’re ridiculous,’ Misty was saying. ‘But it’s like Warhol himself said,
Everybody’s plastic, but I love plastic.’
    She looked up then and caught Terry’s eye and he attempted a smile that came out as an idiot leer. She frowned impatiently, and it just made her look prettier, and made him ache with hopeless yearning. And just then the two older guys came for him.
    They loped into his office with no door, all faded denim and lank hair, untouched by the changes happening on what Terry and everyone else on
The Paper
thought of as
the street
.
    ‘Smoke, man?’ one of them said.
    Terry was immediately on his feet, practically snapping to attention, and holding out a packet of Silk Cut. And the older guys looked at each other and smiled.
    Five minutes later Terry felt like he was dying.
    With the giant spliff still in his hand, Terry shivered and shuddered, the sweat pouring down his face, his back, making his capped T-shirt stick to his skin. He wanted to lie down. He wanted to be sick. He wanted it all to be over.
    The older guys had stopped cackling with laughter and were starting to look concerned. Their faces swam in front of Terry’s rolling eyes. One of them prised the joint from Terry’s fist.
    ‘Are you okay, man?’
    ‘He’s
really
wasted, man.’
    They were in the shadow of the monstrous grey tower block that was home to
The Paper
– an entire skyscraper full of magazines about every subject under the sun, from stamp collecting and hunting foxes and cars and football and knitting all the way to music, three titles on every floor – loitering in a scrap of wasteland that doubled as a makeshift car park, overlooking a silvery patch of the Thames and the mournful tug boats.
    ‘Don’t feel well,’ Terry croaked. ‘Might sit down. Until feel better.’
    The older guys went, leaving him to his fate. It was…now what was the word? What was the word that