Nico Read Online Free Page A

Why be beastly? And what did Venus get? … Immortality.
    Toby
    Toby, the drummer, lifted the gate latch. Immediately the children fluttered around him, pulling at his cap, tugging at the sleeves of his leather jacket. They adored him. Everyone did. Tall, amiable, curly-haired, he had that perennial boyishness that girls especially find so attractive and unthreatening. (Though he could pack a punch, he preferred to take it out on his drums.)
    I let him in.
    â€˜Hiya, Jim, what’s er …’ He looked around. ‘Who’s er … where’s er … ?’
    I shrugged my shoulders and mimed a shot in the arm.
    He nodded, flipped open his Bensons, threw me one, and settled into the Daily Mirror .
    â€˜Know’ow many dates we’re doin’?’ he asked, snorting a line of bathtub speed.
    â€˜All I know is, it’s two weeks in Italy, the Dr Demetrius sunshine break.’
    He offered me the rolled £5 note. I shook my head. He snorted the other line.
    â€˜Wur is’e then, physician ter the famous?’
    â€˜Gone to find a phone. He’s trying to locate someone called Raincoat.’
    â€˜Raincoat?’
    â€˜Yes. I’m sure that was his name … the sound engineer.’
    Toby laughed. ‘I know Raincoat … “sound engineer” is it now? Last week’e wur a ladies’ ’airdresser.’ He carried on laughing until he began to cough up his smoker’s phlegm, which he spat out the window.
    (‘One in rags,
    And one in jags …’)
    â€˜Toby … Toby,’ waved the children.
    After an hour of chainsmoking smalltalk we decided it might be a good idea if we at least set up the instruments.
    The rehearsal room was, in effect, Echo’s spare bedroom, a place to hide from conjugal demands or excited children. Heaps of gutted speaker cabinets were piled up like empty coffins, guitars with no strings, blown-out amplifiers. In the corner, by the window, was Echo’s bed. And on the bed, arranged in a sculptural contrapposto, were Nico, and Echo, fast asleep, a hypodermic at their side. Despite their narcosis there was something innocent about them. They recalled one of those seventeenth-century marmoreal effigies of dead infants embracing … skin an alabaster white, heads thrown back in a lifeless surrender to the Eternal.
    â€˜That’s me off.’ Toby fixed the brim of his cap, buttoned up his jacket and was out the back door. I followed him.
    Demetrius was in a parenthesis of bliss, sitting in his car, listening to country and western and chewing on a Big Mac.
    Toby tapped on the window:
    â€˜It’s not’appenin’, mate … Scagged up.’
    Dr Demetrius kept an office on the top floor of a crumbling but dignified Victorian block on Newton Street, near Piccadilly, in the centre of Manchester. Brooding nineteenth-century warehouses, empty then, at times of use to the Jewish and Asian wholesale garment trade.
    A pickled old Irish misanthrope ran the lift:
    â€˜Woy don’t yer fockin’ walk up, y’idle swines?’
    Toby and I stood there, speechless.
    Demetrius butted in: ‘Good afternoon, Tommy, top floor, toute suite, last one up is a Proddy dog.’
    Old Tommy wheezed whiskey-stained threats under his breath as he cranked down the ancient brass handle. ‘Headen … Godless, idle headen.’
    As we stepped out he coughed up a crescendo of bronchitic malevolence. ‘Fock-ock-ockin’ Fairies … should be strangulated at birth.’ The lift door slammed and he descended back to his cubbyhole in hell, waiting for someone else to hate.
    â€˜Do step this way, gentlemen.’ Demetrius ushered us into the nerve centre of his entertainment empire. He lifted a stack of invitations to Dr Demetrius’s creditors meeting and annual ball off one chair and brushed a cat off another.
    â€˜Take a pew.’
    I sat down and looked around.
    Paperwork was strewn