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Everything was gray, and the streets were black. Everything was swollen with rain, soaked and dreary and drowning. Paul Banks pushed his mirrored shades down on the bridge of his nose and noted how the color of the sky matched his suit quite nicely.
It was a brisk day in the fall of New York. October 16th, 2002, to be exact. Paul was standing on the sidewalk in Times Square right after a brief but ferocious rain, during which he had ducked beneath the neon-blue awning of a pawnshop for shelter. He was unscathed, save for a few beads of dirty rainwater on his black boots.
The air had turned cold but refreshing, and for a few minutes, the city had been quiet – not silent, but almost – while the sound of rain masked everything else. He closed his eyes behind the disguise of his silvery glasses that reflected everything around him.
A herd of old ladies, numbering five, shouldered past him, cackling and gossiping with their cheap cotton shawls over their heads. A truck turned a corner harshly with the curdling screech of brakes. The door of the pawnshop that Paul was standing before opened and the bell hanging in the archway tinkled musically.
Paul opened his eyes, briefly ran his hands over his hair to make sure it looked alright, and kept walking.
“I’m an observer,” he mused to himself, somewhat pleased at this quiet revelation. “I drink in the world and I spit it back out in a different form.” His mirrored glasses caught the dank black of a passing storm cloud and reflected it.
-
Sun… bright sun… Right through the curtains like a silent stalker it came, knifing into Carl’s peaceful sleep, digging into his slumber and finally tossing him out of bed in a rumpled foul-mouthed heap.
He stumbled to the bathroom with a groggy sleep-clogged groan. Waking up was the most painful thing Carl had ever done. Come to think of it, waking up yesterday was fucking horrible, too. The day before that, Carl had told John in a fit of diva-like rage, “I would rather gouge out my own eyeballs with a butter knife than get out of bed.”
John just gave him a look.
Carl didn’t even flip on the light in the bathroom – it was a pristine hotel bathroom, every flat surface constructed of granite, which was ice-fucking-cold under Carl’s bare feet. He had a few options here: tame his hair, shower, brush his teeth, put on his clothes. None of them were appealing, so he simply pulled on a crumpled shirt that lay right outside the bathroom door.
He wandered out into the hall, to the door directly adjacent to his. He was pretty sure this was either Pete or Gary’s room. Since the current US tour was pulling in so much revenue, they all got their own separate rooms in hotels now. It was a foreign but very welcome luxury. Pete snored like an engine with a horsepower no man had ever dreamed of.
Carl half-heartedly knocked on the door.
And it was Pete who pulled it open, looking mildly hungover but pleased to see Carl. “Good morning, sugar.”
“Fuck off, you.” Carl waved a hand. “What time is it?”
“What, your watch doesn’t work?”
“Think I stepped on it or something.” Indeed, the face of his watch was splintered, and if the hands were ticking as they should have been, Carl couldn’t tell. “It’s a cheap piece of shit anyway.”
“And we can obviously afford better, now, can’t we,” Pete crowed, his cheeks bunching like some sort of shag-haired hamster when he smiled too wide. “How does a diamond-crusted Rolex sound to you, Carl?”
Carl rolled his eyes. “Diamond-crusted Rolex! You are speaking to the future king of all music. I want a watch that will align the fucking planets.”
Pete giggled. “It’s about six in the evening our time.”
“So, that makes it about one in superbly fucked up American time, no?”
“Indeed.”
“I haven’t woke up at six in the evening since I was bloody fifteen,” Carl mumbled, sticking his hands in the pockets of his greasy jeans.
“Oh, d’you know what I found?” Pete said suddenly. “Remember the weird blokes we were with a couple months back? One of the Leeds bands, I think. They all wore suits and we called them pansies.”
Carl chewed his lip. “We call lots of people in suits pansies.”
“Yeah but we were just taking the piss with these guys.”
“That narrows it down.”
“And some old cunt came in waving her hammer about.”
Carl couldn’t hold back the shriek of laughter and surprise. “The old hammer lady! Shit! That’s Interpol!”
“Yeah, Interpol, that was their name,” Pete said emphatically, grinning from ear to ear. Definitely a hamster resemblance. “Wasn’t that wild?”
“What did you find, then?”
Pete fished in his pocket for a second, the little pink tip of his tongue sticking out of his mouth in a look of extreme concentration. Finally he procured a scrap of paper with some scribbles on it.
A couple phone numbers and names. Whatever else had been written on it had been ruined by coffee cup stains, ketchup, and some sort of unidentifiable grease.
“They told us to call them whenever we came ‘round, remember?”
Carl remembered.
The tall blonde skinny one had handed Pete this exact same scrap of paper. They had been standing outside Carl and Pete’s flat, all eight of them shaking and giggling from the recent scare by the gray-haired little lady with a massive piece of blunt hardware that seemed to be very intent on ending their lives. Pete had closed the piece of paper in his fist without even looking at it. “Come see us sometime,” the blonde one said, his voice a funny mangle of Essex lilt and New York drone. “We’ll always be around.”
Carl squinted at the paper. Next to a messy parade of digits were slanting, neatly-formed letters. “Paul Banks. Call me.”
TO BE CONTINUED
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