Of course it was a case of mistaken identity. No one could have known there were two people identical in every detail, down to time of birth. They even shared identical fingerprints, authorities said, as they scrambled to undo the judicial bows they’d neatly tied up years before. But these two people, bound it seemed by the umbilical cord of destiny, had never spent time together, certainly not in a womb. After John was pardoned and released, and Joe was arraigned and charged, the uncanny identicalness between them became the media’s fascination. Was it possible they co-existed in parallel universes and somehow time had betrayed one of them – dropping whichever one into the timeline of the other by sheer fluke. They met once, according to an undisclosed source, in the holding pen of county central, for DNA tests – again. Like watching two opposites attracting and detracting at the same time, the source said, as if they were both magnets and the urge to unite was exactly equal to the force of repulsion. It was an interesting story, a real headline grabber, and as John began to readjust to civilised society and sudden wealth, Joe began his slide down into the bowels of the penal system. Joe had been reasonably well off, while at liberty, John had been a drifter, a dreamer, a poet of little merit. When Joe’s lover Caitlin became romantically involved with John, the TV and sofa brigade found them-selves irresistibly titillated . . .
I bet they did, but enough of that, someone else’ll finish it off one day. More importantly, let’s talk about weather – it was minus five, maybe minus six, people have a tendency to quit counting anything as the thermometer plummets, even sheep, unless they’re real ones. Keeping warm takes over, no matter how, but what you don’t want to be doing is wandering around the streets of a deserted town a long way from your own, in the pursuit of cheap punk thrills. But of course you are, otherwise there’d be no story – would there? It’s 1977, the Sex Pistols are “rumoured” to be playing this frozen toilet I’m stranded in, underwear-less. I know, the weather was cold on the coast, but here, four hours by train later, I’m rueing my decision to be recklessly King’s Road chic. I came armed with a friend, another gormless tosser with a septic lip, a tattered raincoat, and a string vest, and just now he’s vanished . . . my arse is blue, like the jeans, the ripped jeans, barely protecting it from the elemental cold of a Midland’s winter’s night. If this is some kind of hoax perpetrated by those gimps at the NME, or worse, by some cretin from Rolling Stone, then it’s not funny – no fun, to coin Mr Rotten.
This is about when a boy in blue, as in blue serge with the lawful epaulettes and insignia of Westminster’s law enforcers stitched on it, comes up to me and shines a flashlight in my face. Of course I look pallid, fallow even, the last time I ate was two days ago. He asks, nay, demands to know why I’m on his street at half-past sheep dip at night looking like the thing from the crypt. As soon as I open my gob to speak, the game’s afoot. ‘From London is yer?’ He grins, rather malevolently.
‘Brighton, actually.’ I correct him.
‘Same difference isn’t it?’ He answers my answer with.
‘Not really, I mean London’s up here right, and Brighton’s . . .’
‘Shut the fuck up.’
‘Alright then.’
Which is when I spy my friend walking along the street towards my situation and then turn around abruptly when he finally realises my situation is irrevocably entangled with the local constabulary.
‘Oi! Scarlett O’Hara, where’d you think you’re going? Get your arse here, on the double.’ The cop shouts in my friend’s direction.
‘Alright then?’ My friend says jovially in his best Liverpuddlian accent, and they’re always jovial, even if they’re intent on smashing your mush into a brick wall or a pint pot.
‘Do you know this piece of garbage?’ The cop says to me.
I shrug in a non-committal manner, ‘Never seen him before governor.’
‘Have you been inside?’ He interrogates me.
‘Inside where?’ I ask . . .
‘This isn’t London boy, you know what I’m talking about.’ He threatens me, with his flashlight.
‘I might have been . . .’ BANG! Ooh, I can see the Big Dipper.
He rounds on my friend, ‘Are you from that bog hole Liverpool?’
‘That I am sir.’ My friend smiles in a cretinous and malignant way.
BANG! I wonder what he’s seeing? Mostly likely the Kop – haha.
‘You two are connected somehow, I can smell it.’ The cop growls, ‘One of you has no underwear on and the other has underwear but no top clothes, what are you, fags?’
‘As if,’ my friend says, climbing to his feet unsteadily, ‘we’re here to see the Pistols.’
‘The fucking what?’
‘Sex Pistols, they’re a band like.’
‘A band, like, like what?’
‘Like you know two guitars a set of drums and a singer.’
‘A pop band then?’
‘Uh, yeah.’
‘All fucking pansies, pop bands, and pansies don’t play here, we like brass, the bigger the better, and that’s all we like, understand?’
‘Uh, yeah.’
The cop takes out his notebook, and worse, his ticketing book, it’s a quiet night and the op to ticket to stragglers from the greater cesspit of the Union is obviously irresistible. He takes my name and address and gives me a ticket, I look at it in disgust, dismay, dismay and disgust. ‘What the fuck?’ I say. He grabs it out of my hand, rips it up, scribbles a new one angrily, ‘Public indecency and verbally assaulting a police officer.’ He smiles, categorically. He scribbles another ticket and shoves it in my friend’s hand, my friend peruses it, as is his wont, let alone right, and smiles graciously, ‘Thank you kindly sir.’ He says ingratiatingly.
‘Now, there’s a train in,’ the cop says as he checks his watch with the flashlight, ‘thirty-eight minutes, be on it or you’ll be in a cell, now, fuck off.’ We comply . . .
‘Fucking wanker.’ I say to my friend.
‘Right fucking sheep shagging plod head.’ My friend concurs as he squeezes puss from his septic lip. ‘How much you get?’ I ask him.
‘Fifteen quid, you?’
‘Twenty fucking five.’
He whistles appreciatively. We sit on a cold hard bench on a cold hard railway station in a cold hard place. My friend screws his ticket up and boots it onto the tracks, I follow suit. ‘What name you give?’ He asks me.
‘Steve Jones,’ I smile, ‘you?’
‘Paul Cook!’
Well, it wasn’t as if we were gonna use Johnny Rotten and Sid Vicious, was it?
We sit there a while, then a figure, all in black, shambles onto the platform carrying a guitar. We look at each other, the figure comes right up, says to us ‘Aye up lads, where’s the gig?’
‘What gig?’ We both say in unison.
‘Like that is it, right, another wasted night. Where’s the pub?’
‘The Brass Monkey?’ We both say in unison.
‘Aye, figures, in main street is it?’
‘Aye.’ We both say in unison.
We watch him lope off into the frigid night. ‘Fucking hell,’ my friend says, ‘that were Johnny Cooper Clarke, the Bard of Salford himself.’
‘He’s a fucking long way from Beasley Street.’
‘Nah, we all live on Beasley Street.’
We both recite the poem – in unison.
