Killing Scorpio - Part One

You must have had this conversation in your head. We all have haven’t we? Or no, maybe I’m wrong. Yes, when I think about it I probably am wrong, I don’t know who you are, your circumstances or anything about you, so let me start again. If you’re a man who’s just turned fifty, a man who’s spent his entire career as a corporate functionary, perhaps you were an accountant or an in-house lawyer, and if you’re comfortably off with a secure job, married with a wife and two kids and a big house in a prosperous rural village, then you must have had this conversation in your head. Surely you have. Tell me it’s not just me. Sometimes it starts when you’re lying in bed at night. The wife’s asleep next to you, she’s lightly snoring, you’ve spent ten minutes fantasising about your son’s new English teacher, but now you’re bored, trying but failing to get to sleep. There, alone in the silence, with all those thoughts still bubbling round a brain that stubbornly refuses to close down, that’s typically when in sleepless desperation you might close your eyes and maybe start to assess your life so far. And you think. And you count your achievements. By any standards you’ve done well. The kids are healthy and doing well at school, the wife is wearing well, the house is almost paid for, the family secure. Objectively you’re a success, particularly given where you came from. You should be happy, and I suppose you are quite happy, but isn’t it all just a little bit dull? And then you start to rationalise. Dull’s OK isn’t it? You can live with dull. Dull gets a bad press. Dull is a small price you’ll happily pay for your plentiful blessings. But then you begin to wonder. Is dull OK? Is it really? And then it starts. What if you’d been, say, an England centre-forward. You picture it, it’s the World Cup Final. You start your run-up to the deciding penalty and a billion worldwide viewers hold their breath. The net ripples and the stadium erupts. A hundred thousand people are chanting your name. What price would you pay to be that man? Or how about the rock star? The platinum albums, the private jets, the groupies. All those people telling you you’re a genius and how the song you wrote changed their lives. Only you know that you dashed it off in twenty minutes while waiting for a bus on Clapham High Street. Or even the best selling author. All those awards, the book tours with first class travel and the best hotels. I bet there’s groupies on those book tours as well. A different kind of groupie but still groupies. So what price would you have paid for a life like that? A lot of them paid a price of course, and sometimes it was a heavy price. The rock stars with the drink and the drugs and the generally unhealthily lifestyle. The footballers, subsumed so young into the academy production line, every need and whim catered for by agents and minders, so much so that when they’re spat out again, spent and worthless at thirty-two, they don’t even know how to buy a cinema ticket. Then there’s the authors, so many with turbulent and damaged personal lives. And those footballers and authors also have their problems with drink and drugs, look at Best, Gascoigne, Hemingway, Fitzgerald. Of course it’s possible to be a rock star and die in your bed at ninety-six surrounded by your great grandchildren, but mortality is a con man and celebrities are the long mark. The youthful resilient body may survive, but all the time it’s keeping score, and when it gets to late middle age it’s payback time. They may have been clean for years, the death certificate may say a heart attack or kidney failure, but the truth is that the past has taken its toll and the worn out body just couldn’t be arsed any more. And that’s when, long past midnight, you get to the final stage of this conversation. If you could have had all the money, the fame, the girls, the adulation, what would you have traded? How many precious minutes, days, even years would you have willingly given up to have lived a little faster but died a little younger? I’ve had this conversation with myself many times, and a few times I’ve had it down the pub with Dave and Pete. Dave once told me that if I’d been a rock star I’d have been dead by the time I was twenty-five. I wasn’t sure what he meant exactly but before I could follow it up he went off to buy another pint.

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On our first day at grammar school we were lined up outside the classroom in alphabetical order then marched in and told to sit at our desks. It was 1969, we were eleven, and some of us were still wearing short trousers. There were thirty boys and the desks were arranged five across and six deep starting with the Abbot twins and ending with a kid called Walton. We sat at those desks for the next four years. I was at the back of the middle row and because my name was Patterson I was sat behind a boy called Mannion. It was several weeks before I found out his first name was Mark because we all called each other by our surnames which morphed over time into nicknames based on our surnames. I became Patsy.

So the years went by, I was still sat behind Mark, but I never actually got to know him that well. We acknowledged each other, exchanged a few words now and again, we never had a fight, but we moved in different orbits. I was a swot, a teacher’s pet, hanging out with the brainy kids and trying to come top in every subject. I must have been an insufferable little prick. Mark lived in a different world. At break-time, while most of us were kicking a tennis ball around the playground Mark and his acolytes were hanging around the toilets, doodling and doing whatever it was that rebellious creative adolescent boys did in those days. T.Rex and Slade were big at the time. I do know he was an outstanding artist. He once showed me a cartoon he’d drawn. There was a boy in our year, a Jamaican called Winston King who was reputed to have an enormous cock and Mark had become fascinated by this. The cartoon was in black ink and filled a whole side of A4 paper. It showed Winston King on the school bus. He was squatting on a seat working his massive knob and shooting a huge spluge of spunk the entire length of the bus and over the heads of his cowering schoolmates. It was breathtaking. Such skill, such detail. I had absolutely no concept that such artistic talent could exist in any fifteen year-old, let alone a contemporary of mine. And it was intimidating, the natural ability on display made me uneasy, it was so far outside my swotty academic comfort zone. Then one day I came into the classroom after lunch and Mark was sat at his desk surrounded by his cronies who were laughing and sniggering. I doubt that I ever got the full story but it seems that during lunch Mark and his gang had cornered Winston King in the music room and forced him to take down his pants and somehow get an erection. Mark then measured the length of Winston’s cock with one on those retractable metal measuring tapes. When he’d finished he’d released the measuring tape while it was still hard against Winston’s cock and let it snap back into its housing, lacerating Winston’s cock on the way back. I never worked out whether Mark was really interested in the length of Winston’s cock or he just wanted to inflict pain. And I never found out how long Winston’s cock was. Probably for the best.

I don’t remember Mark getting into any real trouble. It was a grammar school, selective, but very much a working class grammar school. Medicine, the law, banking, even university or the civil service was not really for the likes of us. The teachers’  idea of aspiration was a secure job with a good pension at Leeds City Council. Despite that I did manage to scrape into university and in the summer of my eighteenth birthday I took the train to London and tried to forget my schooldays had ever happened. I doubt that I thought about Mark for decades but if you’d pressed me I don’t think I’d have said he had a golden future with Leeds City Council.

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And so, in due course, I became a corporate functionary, and to this day I tell people I don’t regret it. I never knew what happened to Mark after we left school and I didn’t really care. Then one day, I was in my late thirties so it must have been the mid-nineties, a strange thing happened. I had a madeleine moment, or at least I had what I imagine to be a madeleine moment, I’ve never read Proust. It was a Saturday morning in March, I’d just finished breakfast and I was still sitting at the kitchen table reading the review section of the Guardian. There was a letter from a reader commenting on the review of some wacky sci-fi novel from the previous week. One sentence in this letter hit me straight between the eyes. I can’t remember the exact wording from so long ago so I’m paraphrasing, but it said something like “afficionados of this style of writing should check out the work of Mark Mannion, a true master of the genre.” Mark Mannion? No, surely not, it’s a fairly common name after all, it couldn’t be him could it? No way, not that pervy loser. And that could have been that. It was the early days of the internet and I wasn’t an early adopter so I couldn’t rush to my laptop and do an online search.

I didn’t mean to remember, I just did. A few months later, it may have been a year, I was in Oxford. It was a rainy Tuesday afternoon and I had time to kill before my train, so I popped into Waterstones to browse the shelves. I checked out the top ten bestsellers and then I remembered I’d been hearing good things about an author called Hilary Mantel. I walked across to “Fiction – M” and scanned the shelves. I found two books by Mantel, “A Place of Greater Safety” and “A Change of Climate” but I ignored them. The book I took down was on the shelf next to them. It was a slim paperback called “Get Your Arse Out” and it was written by someone called Mark Mannion. I studied the cover. It was a drawing of the top half of a skeletal faced biker looking backwards over his shoulder with a cigarette clenched between his teeth. He was holding a heavy machine gun and wearing a nazi helmet, and on the back of his jacket were the words “Aztecs” and “Sodom”. An endorsement from the NME read “Hilarious...Tons of side splitting two fisted action on every screaming page” and stood above several skulls littering the foot of the page. Well, what’s not to like? How could a good company drone resist? I looked inside the front and back covers. There was no author’s biography to identify this Mark Mannion as my Mark Mannion, but there was a note at the foot of the front cover which read “A Romance By Mark Mannion AKA Scorpio Zeitgeist.” Scorpio Zeitgeist? Who the fuck is Scorpio Zeitgeist?

I bought it and read it. It wasn’t very good, but the protagonist was a shaman living on a narrow boat on the Leeds-Liverpool canal divining the future of his clients from their still warm turds. Promising. Yes, I think that this Mark Mannion may indeed be my Mark Mannion. 

And so my interest was piqued. From then on every time I went into a bookshop I looked for more books by Mark Mannion. I wasn’t very successful until one day I picked up a copy of “Fuck Me Dead”, in Daunt Books on Marylebone High Street of all places. The bright scarlet letters of the title bracketed a black and white photo of a Charles Manson lookalike in a faded denim jacket with greasy shoulder length hair, his arms outstretched in a messianic crucifixion pose. I stared at the portrait. Yes, he’d changed a lot, but that was Mark alright. But the really intriguing thing was the book’s subtitle, “The Unspeakable Confessions of Scorpio Zeitgeist”. I took it home.

It wasn’t exactly literature. It seemed that Mark was the founder and creative force behind a band called Scorpio Zeitgeist and The Sons of Empathy and he’d become something of a minor rock star. This was all news to me and a little annoying as at the time I thought I was something of a cognoscente of the contemporary music scene. I was more comfortable with Mr Google by now so I did some more digging. Apparently Scorpio and his boys were “massively successful worldwide” and had toured America several times where they had “a huge cult following”. WTF? I was completely nonplussed. How on earth had I never heard of him? I began to ask around at work. When I mentioned Scorpio to my British colleagues all I got was blank looks, but a German colleague recognised him immediately and a French colleague said he was a big fan. The next day he showed me his CD of their greatest hits.

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I did my research and concluded that SZ and the SOE must be one of those British bands you sometimes hear about, the ones that are big abroad but are almost unknown at home. The English Beat anyone? It made sense, after all, heavy rock was hardly du jour in the UK at the time. James Blunt was in the charts. I suppose I became a little obsessed with Scorpio over the years. No, I was worse than obsessed. I was jealous, I admit it. I was bright roaring green with envy. He’d been touring the world, off his tits on coke and fanny while I’d been making sure my company’s financial statements complied with international accounting standards.

It came as a complete surprise when I was down the pub with Charlie one night when right out of the blue he suddenly said:

“I see your mate Scorpio’s coming to the O2.”

“What? The O2 in Oxford? No shit!”

“Yep. Farewell tour or something. It’s only a couple of weeks away.”

“Fuck me, how do you get tickets?”

And that’s how I came to be stood outside the O2 on the Cowley Road on a wet Thursday night in November clutching my copy of “Fuck Me Dead”.