Chapter 16

The small town of Hay-on-Wye, with its forty bookshops and international literary festival, was obviously an attraction for Jeremy and me as we were in the book trade. Alicia too was happy to spend another long weekend in her girlfriend's five-bedroom detached 'cottage' on the edge of the town. Dale was keen to go, if only to take a break away from London for a few days. Coincidentally, Loyd Larcher was due to speak at a festival event on Saturday evening.

Loyd and Alicia had finished writing their sections of Quick's biography, but Dale, Jeremy and I still had lots to do. Loyd's chapter was so professional, it set a standard that was hard for the rest of us to match. He even found some early photographs, including one of Quick and Teef as boys in their Sunday best on a school outing. Quick in particular was remarkably innocent and lovable. Hearing of our visit to Hay, Loyd gave us complimentary tickets to his talk.

The last part of Alicia's chapter dealt with Quick's experiences with the Oracles of Aten, her recollections from the nineteen-sixties reinforced by her recent visit to Sussex to see the sect's founder. She explained how members of the Oracles of Aten sect arrived in England from North America, and they and the Boulders expected their collaboration to generate a flurry of news coverage.

Quick was determined to bed their High Priestess, the beautiful twenty-two-year-old daughter of a Texas oil magnate. She was said to have conducted his initiation ritual in person. This ceremony took place in the cult's premises, a building that had earlier been a small private school. The stuffed heads of deer that had once adorned the main hall had been replaced by wall paintings of pyramids and figures in the style of ancient Egyptian tomb paintings. The cult's services consisted of interminable monotonous chants, interrupted by brief prayers from priests and priestesses. Flowers and other supposedly sacred objects, such as saucer sized flat stones from the seashore, were dedicated to the god Aten. Flames from ornate candles flickered, and pungently scented smoke wafted liberally from censers.

Towards the climax of Quick's initiation he was given a pendant in the shape of the ankh, the ancient Egyptian symbol of life. After more chanting, bowing and kneeling, a sheet of flame whooshed suddenly upwards from the altar, and the youthful High Priestess conducted Rick through a concealed door into her private chamber.

At around this time, as Alicia had already told me, the band had begun work on a rock opera based on the cult's sacred texts. Only one song from this project was known to have survived, though no recording was ever released. In mood and style it was, as Alicia had said, quite different from the rest of The Rocking Boulders' music. Sensitive and melodic, it conveyed the sorrow of a priest over the death of a childhood friend, the subject of the final chapters of the sect's book.

Hopes that the cult might inspire the Boulders to take a new musical direction did not last. A paternity suit from the High Priestess' solicitor brought Quick the news that she was pregnant. The Boulders' involvement with the cult was terminated rapidly. The veracity of the cult's claim to be grounded in ancient religion was questioned, and the band engaged Alicia, as a professional Egyptologist, to investigate it. She reported that, aside from use of the name Aten and images of pyramids and human figures in the style of tomb paintings, the cult's beliefs, ceremonies and teachings were entirely of their own invention, without any historical basis.

The cult ran out of money before the paternity case reached court. The High Priestess returned to her oil magnate father and married one of his business partners. The founder of the sect remained in Sussex and became a dealer supplying antiques to customers in the United States. Work on the Boulders' rock opera was abandoned.

I gave Loyd's and Alicia's chapters of the 'auto'biography to The Handyman, who had to send them for clearance to the Boulder's lawyers, and then for final approval to a trusted music journalist who had travelled with the band on some of their tours. In passing I mentioned our trip to Hay-on-Wye, and Loyd's talk. He insisted on joining us: 'Larcher's giving a talk at a festival? He's not going to mention Quick's book, is he? You'd better make sure he doesn't. We'll all be in the shit if he lets on before the publicity moguls announce it.'

'Of course he won't. You would think that, wouldn't you? He won't be spreading gossip; in the past he's too often been the victim of it. He's a hugely successful writer. Quick's book is no big thing for him, we're lucky he agreed to help us with it. He's hardly likely to be a big fan of the Boulders. I'm not even going to mention what you've just said. He'd be very badly offended.'

'Well, what else has he got worth talking about?'

'Giving talks is something he does. He was on a lecture tour in the States not long ago.'

'Well, one of us must have the wrong idea about him. So in case it's you, we'd better make sure. Get me a ticket. Buy one, if necessary, and charge it on expenses. If your friend Loyd Larcher does decide to get himself a lot of free publicity by telling the world about Quick's book, the papers will be full of it the next day. Quick will go berserk.'

He had as much right to go to Loyd's talk as anyone, but his turning up at Hay meant that business would intrude on our few days' break. 'We're staying with Alicia's girlfriend, who lives up there. I can't ask her to put you up too, and all the hotels for miles around will be booked up for the festival.'

'What, do you think driving to Hay and back in a day and going to a talk while I'm there is going to be a big deal for me? What's the matter with you? Just get me a fucking ticket, will you? Be a good idea for me to see what this festival is like. When the book comes out Quick will want places where he can parade himself round, sign copies, and get his picture in the papers. Next year's festival might be perfect for it. I'll meet you up there, on Saturday afternoon before the talk, so I can sus it all out.'

If Alicia, Myrtle, Jeremy, Dale and I were to be away at the same time, cover had to be found for the shops. A friend of Jeremy's who had retired from the local council sometimes stood in if either of us was away. Jake was still working part time for Smiles at the Give and Take, and I suggested we also ask him to help. He had already made a good impression when he brought in some leaflets about his sports trophies and award certificates, and asked Jeremy and Alicia to display them. In return he offered to put round some leaflets about their shops.

On the first Friday in June, we set off for our long weekend in Hay-on-Wye. Myrtle insisted on providing transport, and drove down to collect us in an eight-seater minibus belonging to the Hay Girls Academy, where she taught music part time. A considerate driver, she would groan whenever she saw someone adopt the no-signal-so-guess-where-I'm-going attitude to road junctions. We took the motorway from Chiswick, and leaving London's congested streets drove past Reading towards Swindon, enjoying a sense of escape as we passed open fields. Then we took trunk roads to Gloucester and Hereford. Dale was delighted by the scenery, and kept saying, 'Wow, we're off to Hay-on-Wye, or should that be Way-on-High?'

'It'll be Gay-on-Wye when we get there, ' Myrtle answered cheerily. For the final stage of the journey she turned onto country lanes to take us through the fine countryside near the border between England and Wales. On the outskirts of Hay, if such a small town can be said to have outskirts, we drew up at a gate bearing a sign saying Myrtle Cottage. This, presumably, was the origin of Alicia's pet name for her girlfriend. The 'cottage' was actually a large Victorian house in an eccentric Tudor style: white rectangles of wall were surrounded by heavy black timbers; the roof was gabled on three sides; a round tower was topped with a cone-shaped roof; and next to it was an old coach house with heavy wooden doors.

Myrtle had inherited the property from her parents, her father having prospered through the sale of agricultural machinery. Behind the lawns and flower beds of the front garden was a vegetable patch, and a chicken run with about twenty hens. The fowl were out in the open, scratching about. I noticed Phoebe, her cat, sitting on a ground floor window ledge snoozing, ignoring the hens, and wondered if she ever tried to get in among them.

Jeremy followed my gaze to the chicken coop and daringly asked: 'Do you keep a cockerel with the hens, Myrtle?'

'No, I bloody well don't. Those hens are perfectly happy as they are, without the male of the species pestering them and disturbing the neighbours with an awful racket in the early hours.'

Alicia showed Jeremy his room, while Myrtle took Dale and me up to ours. 'I've put you two in the bridal suite, ' she said, opening the door of a large bedroom with an enormous window. The furniture was of the same vintage as the building; old blue and white porcelain plates and vases stood on every window ledge and shelf. You could understand how attached she was to this childhood home, and that Alicia would be put off living there, permanently surrounded by so much from her girlfriend's past.

When we returned downstairs Alicia was on the phone arranging to sell some of her magical realism pens in the marquee after Loyd's talk. She badgered me into helping. She had already borrowed a little folding table from Jeremy on which to set out the pens. Myrtle took the phone from her and rang the corner café in the town to ask them to keep a table free for us for lunch.

We were seated close to a couple with a toddler in a child-buggy, shaded by a parasol with prominent red polka dots. Alicia and Myrtle made rude remarks in low voices about the child being ugly, murmuring that it might do all right as a garden gnome, and that its parents might at least have put a mask over its face. It was a bit odd, for despite the afternoon sun it wore a woolly hat with flaps that were buttoned under its chin. Fortunately the couple were too absorbed in trying to stop the poor thing crying to pay any attention to us. Jeremy, offended for them, said 'Amazing how disdainful childless adults are of other people's offspring.'

'Don't be so bloody righteous, ' Myrtle responded. 'We're having a bit of fun at the expense of straights, that's all.'

He shook his head sadly. 'As long as we're not being unfair to anyone.'

After lunch Myrtle and Alicia went to buy groceries while Dale, Jeremy and I visited some of the second-hand bookshops. They far outnumbered all other types of shop in the main thoroughfares. Many had silly names like Brought to Book, What a Bind, Rabid Reads, and B.O.O.K. — Best Overall Organizer of Knowledge. We wandered from one old-fashioned shop front to another, browsing the great range of second-hand volumes on sale. The town's 'Old Cinema' had been converted into a bookshop, and beyond it, through a gate in a garden wall, we found a house full of books, with a dozen bookshelves placed outdoors around the front lawn. Polythene sheets had been folded back, ready to use in case of a shower, but quite a lot of these unsheltered volumes were worn and faded, evidently getting their last chance of finding another home before they fell apart.

Jeremy had no time for these leftovers, but could not resist some of the rarities from specialist shops. A couple of hours later, when we went to find Alicia and Myrtle, our hands were full of purchases that he was convinced we would sell quickly at a profit in London. This was silly because Hay bookshops also sold over the internet, and the books would not magically become easier to sell from a London shop, but he enjoyed haggling over his purchases.

We found Alicia and Myrtle at the end of Castle Street, standing where a large plane tree narrowed the footway, apparently absorbed in conversation, but in fact deliberately blocking the pavement. They ignored the 'Excuse me's of passing book-lovers, forcing them out onto the road to get by. Myrtle responded to Dale's suggestion that we all move to where the pavement was wider with: 'This is a public right of way, we're entitled to stand here for as long as we want to.'

Jeremy said, 'You've picked this spot on purpose out of devilment. You take pleasure in inconveniencing the great and good people here for the book festival.'

Myrtle answered, 'Yes, we enjoy being awkward, and we're good at it; we've been specially trained.' She and Alicia then resumed their conversation. We walked on a short way to wait until they tired of being in everyone's way and followed us.

In the evening they cooked an excellent meal. Afterwards Myrtle brought out a large cardboard box of old things from the nineteen-seventies about the Gay Liberation Front. She had copies of the GLF magazine Come Together, and various hand-outs that must have been hammered onto wax stencils using a typewriter, and run off with one of those old duplicating machines that people used before the invention of photocopiers. She also had some photographs and about a dozen different badges with slogans like Glad to be Gay and Keep Your Filthy Laws Off My Body. She handed us various items to examine, but Phoebe, sitting in my lap, made it difficult for me to reach out for these treasures. Dale, leafing through a copy of Come Together, exclaimed: 'There's an advert in here for something called the Paedophile Information Exchange, P ... I ... E... , PIE!'

'Oh dear, ' Jeremy said, 'those wretched ads have become a gift to everyone who wants to criticize the Gay Liberation Front. Naivety often goes with idealism. A lot of people in GLF were unhappy about them at the time, but others argued it would be more dangerous to force paedophiles into secrecy. There were grounds for saying that GLF should be willing to listen to everyone, since we had ourselves been persecuted, criminalized, and forced to lead double lives. GLF was anarchic, there was no membership as such, anyone could come along to a meeting and say whatever they liked. Society was much more repressive and authoritarian then. Lots of things were done to kids at home and in schools that would be unthinkable now, harsh corporal punishment, for example. Still, those PIE ads were a serious mistake. They got in the way of the important messages about coming out, being honest with ourselves, not being ashamed of our own natures, and treating others with respect.'

'PIE would never have had a chance if men had not been so dominant in the gay rights movement, ' Myrtle said. 'It's nearly always men who abuse children.'

'There have been some very nasty cases where women played a part, or were the instigators, ' Dale argued.

'Not many, ' Myrtle insisted.

From the box she pulled out an envelope of photographs. Several were of her and Jeremy, then in their twenties, among groups of friends. They wore close fitting, richly coloured clothes, and flared trousers. The men had long hair, and everyone wore badges. How slim and attractive Jeremy was in those days, sporting a shirt with a pattern of autumn leaves above tight pinkish-grey trousers. 'You were on the pull that night, ' I said.

'It's how lots of young men dressed at the time, straight as well as gay. We wanted to show ourselves off, all part of the new age of unashamed sexual freedom. There was a huge sense of shedding the constraints that our parents laboured under, of rejecting authority. We were striking out for a better world.'

'Where's that list of the groups GLF used to have, ' Myrtle said, shuffling through the box. 'Here we are.' She read out the names of about half a dozen groups, including the Manifesto Group, the Counter-Psychiatry Group, and the Catering Group. 'And which group, ' she asked, 'do you think Jeremy belonged to?'

'I belonged to the Catering Group, ' he said laughing. 'Everyone helped in whatever way they could. We men in the catering group were showing our independence from the traditional male role. Some of us baked cakes, as well as making the teas and coffees. We also helped to get things organized generally. The Catering Group made its contribution, including raising a little money. Even in a radical group like GLF, some things had to be paid for. You feminists, ' he said looking at Myrtle, 'had your own agenda ... so did some of the others who turned up. The revolutionary socialists were another lot, with their background in student politics, sit-ins, and different flavours of Marxism. In real life putting up posters of Che Guevara was the nearest any of them were ever likely to get to violent revolution.

'All sorts used to turn up at the meetings, Vietnam war draft dodgers from the US, ex-hippy drug freaks. You remember that strange American with the ferocious black hair and beard? He used to stand up and deliver an impassioned diatribe at pretty well every meeting, but I never met anyone who could tell me afterwards what he had been raving on about. Yet we got accustomed to his harangues, meeting after meeting. There was excitement in the air, something exceptional about the idealism, about our crusading zeal against our oppressors. We were demanding our place in a society that had spurned us for so long.'

'You gay men were latching on to the women's rights movement, ' Myrtle countered.

Alicia said, 'At least he stuck with it. He didn't go marching out in a huff.'

'My dear Alicia, ' Myrtle said, 'we lesbian feminists did not go marching out in a huff. Huffs are something we were biologically not capable of. What we did was to register a proper and entirely justified protest against the domination of the meetings by men. We showed our rejection of their male chauvinist oppression by the only effective means open to us, by walking out. And how long did GLF last after we walked out?'

'It's true that it fragmented after a few years, but whatever the disagreements, ' Jeremy reasoned, 'it did change attitudes. It led up to the Gay Pride events and many of the gay and lesbian groups that exist today. If the only thing we had done had been to stand in public view wearing badges that showed we were gay, we would have helped to end decades of secrecy, pretence, shame and guilt.'

'I'm not going to argue with that, ' Myrtle said. She judged that we were all growing tired and began returning her GLF souvenirs to their box. 'Would anyone like tea or coffee now?' she asked.

Though it was not very late, we were all ready to turn in. Myrtle chased Phoebe off my lap, saying 'She'll be following you into the bedroom if you don't watch out, ' before handing me my drink. 'Do you have any pets of your own?'

'We've got each other, ' I said, smiling at Dale.

'Lucky old you, ' she answered, in a tone that suggested she thought otherwise.

When Dale and I were on our way towards the stairs to go up to bed, she could not resist having a cheeky dig at us. She came over and said in pretended embarrassment, 'Before you go up, I hope you won't mind me asking, but I'm a bit concerned about the sheets, well, you know, stains from bodily fluids can be very persistent. I expect you two are too tired to be getting up to anything like that tonight, aren't you?'

Dale and I glanced briefly at each other. Guessing she must be joking, he answered, 'The trouble is, Myrtle, Ben can never get off to sleep properly unless I give him a good seeing to first.'

'Oh well, ' she said, 'in that case I suppose you must.'

I could, of course, equally well have said the same of him, if only I had thought of it first.

Myrtle need not have been concerned about her sheets that night. We were so sleepy that we settled for comforting sexual relief rather than giving each other a good seeing to. Having slept solidly, we went down for breakfast in the morning ready for an eventful day. Myrtle gave us eggs from her hens for breakfast, the yolks an exceptionally deep yellow-orange colour. Phoebe watched me eating. 'She doesn't worry the hens at all?' I asked.