The Apocryfan (5)

Adrian’s brother, Charlie Bubbles, put the flat black vinyl disc of a David McWilliams song on the 45 rpm spinning padded bakelite ‘plate’. So much more professional than his Dansette autochange of his recent youth. He squawked a few pointless words over the Winter airwaves …. Introductory jabber above a competing jingle about Radio Caroline and its current sponsor.

Bulova Watches, meanwhile, told the time at the head of each hour. The news was brought by courtesy of ripping off the BBC. The turntable itself was cushioned by shock absorbers to absorb the shock of the waves. The real waves. The ship’s transmitter mast, even on a relatively calm day like today, swung quite a distance from the true as well as the magnetic vertical between the slow-sloping horizons of the North Sea.

Charlie looked through the grimy window of his musical cockpit and knew that one of his horizons was the sight of Bonnyville upon the nearest coast. Its war memorial stuck up like a wounded thumb. He wondered how Adrian was getting on. Spent most of his days in the ‘Sixpenny Queen’. Charlie shrugged. They had travelled to Bonnyville, both with the ambition to become Disc Jockeys on the new-fledged army of pirate stations that were at that time setting up. But only Charlie had made the grade with his ‘gift of the gab’. Charlie was a man of communication’s massive future. Adrian had always been the more churlish, the more taciturn of the two. So, Adrian had to resort to merely being part of the supply chain for the radio station’s catering. He rowed the boat of provisions to and from the shore. When he wasn’t drinking or mouching on the pier or eyeing Claura’s backside, that is.

Even at this very moment, Adrian gazed out of the pub’s window towards the sea and the tiny silhouette of the single tall-masted ship against the darkening sky … at the same time as Charlie looked out of his own cockpit window during the teatime show. Their two unconscious gazes met across the sea. Adrian turned towards the only other customer in the pub. The Winter Visitor. A man whose trouser turn-ups were stacked with bread crumbs.

*
As the Winter months unfolded from one to the other, seemingly endlessly, the forest of tall single-masted ships gathered momentum in the East, making this section of the coast a force-field of tangled programming, mixing Stones with Yardbirds. Indeed, eventually, the radio ship on which Charlie had been based was forced to travel many miles round the coast to a North Western area with the intention of pioneering offshore radio within the tarry waters of Black Pool. Before it departed, Charlie had transferred to a rival ship, as he didn’t want to leave his kid brother Adrian alone in the Bonnyville area. Or that was the reason he gave himself at the time. So soon forgotten.

Adrian still rowed the boat to and fro. The weather was counter-productive and, often, the sea-sick disc-jockeys were left abandoned for weeks at a time. The hit parades were kept afloat by sheer grit and determination. And ambition.

Adrian was struck by nothing. He had ceased to be that care-free, confident lad he had once been before coming to Bonnyville, one with far more natural gumption than those drinking-friends with whom he mixed in the ‘Sixpenny Queen’. He hadn’t always been the morose taciturn individual that Bonnyville had turned him into. Charlie had soon ceased to recognise him. And vice versa.

Charlie had become a big noise. Charlie Bubbles: now a household name in the transmission area of the radio ship. And beyond. He never wanted to go on shore leave, because he needed to forge ahead with his show business ambitions of celebrity, perhaps with a future TV chat show on the horizon (given the strength of fantasy and imagination). He was always on the air. Often standing-in for John Peel during the small hours in the Perfumed Garden. A workaholic. A ship-freak.

Adrian had his own erstwhile liveliness sucked out by the persona of Charlie Bubbles. Not a half-brother, but a whole one. As if Charlie was a celebrity vampire: feasting on the profile of his kid brother, whilst also lowering the profiles of all those who listened to him or of visitors to the ship with whom he came into contact.

These visitors left as lesser mortals ... careering up and down in the sluggish dinghy, as they prepared (inside their heads) journalistic copy on Charlie Bubbles for the next edition of New Musical Express.

*
The town of Bonnyville – now unseen from the top of the war memorial where no dare-devil had climbed for ages (given the increasingly cowed quality even of the town’s callow youth) – had within its overall pattern of streets and buildings gained the easily imagined configuration of a snouted face. And, unseen, too, the radiant blue ‘skin’ of the Apocryphan’s extended arm holding a fanned hand of trump cards towards blinkered passers-by.

Perhaps the memorial itself was a sort of radio transmitter, broadcastng mind-crushing gloom, unmixed by any popular music of the times. Unrelieved by bubbly chatter between the black vinyl tracks.

Continued: HERE.

================================

Suggested background reading:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Caroline
http://weirdmonger.blogspot.com/2004/06/my-giddy-aunt.html
http://simplon.blogspirit.com/archive/2006/05/24/the-mansion-with-two-bedsits.html
'Brief Visit To Bonnyville' - in TTA (1994) & 'The Weirdmonger' book (Prime 2003).

===================================