Dream On Read online

  Dream On

  Terry Tyler

  Copyright © 2012 by Terry Tyler

  This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author's imagination or used fictitiously.

  Any resemblance to actual events, websites, locations or persons, alive or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical or otherwise, without the express written permission of Terry Tyler.

  All rights reserved.

  Cover art by CraniumXDesign

  I would like to thank my beloved husband Mark and the rest of my family for their support, help and interest.

  A special mention to Kev Hodgson for walking down that cobbled street...

  ...and big thanks to Julia, Joel Cortez, David Stirling, Jacki Lee, Dave Waters, Breakers Cafe, Cromer - and cheers to Susan, KJ, Zoe, Charles, Jan, George, Clive, Andy and all my fellow writer friends.

  Contents

  PROLOGUE - Early August, 2007

  ONE - A Week Earlier

  TWO

  THREE - Four Weeks Later

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX - Glynis Tooke's Creative Workshop

  SEVEN - Raw Talent!

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN - Christmas

  ELEVEN - Happy New Year!

  TWELVE - Raw Talent ~ Day One

  THIRTEEN - Raw Talent ~ Day Two

  FOURTEEN - Raw Talent ~ Day Three

  FIFTEEN - Raw Talent ~ The Results

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN - The Parting Of Ways

  EIGHTEEN - Spring Into Summer, 2008

  NINETEEN - June 2009 - A Year Later

  PROLOGUE

  Early August, 2007

  "Success is what happens when everyone else is asleep."

  Dave Bentley had read that, somewhere.

  The idea for his new band had socked him over the head at about three o'clock one morning, so he thought it was about right.

  THOR!

  He couldn't wait to tell the others.

  "What, you mean we've got to dress up like Vikings?" Shane Cowley said. "I'm not wearing one of those helmets, it'll spoil me hair!" He laughed, and gave his tousled flaxen mane an exaggerated flick.

  "Boz won't mind, he'll do owt for a laugh," said Ritchie Myers. He took a gulp from his can of lager, leaving froth on his black moustache. "Boz, he dressed up as a drunk vicar when he was drumming with that punk band last week."

  "What punk band was that?" Shane asked.

  "The Drunk Vicars."

  "Ah. Right." Shane frowned. "How did he dress up as a drunk vicar, then?"

  "Well, he wore a dog collar and a long black dress, made his hair stick up on end with gel, like, then he put purple lipstick on his cheeks and nose to make him look like a wino."

  Shane laughed. "Quality!"

  "Can we stick to the matter in hand, please?" Dave said. Why weren't they taking this seriously? His idea was unique, the best he'd ever had; they were supposed to be stricken with awe by its brilliance. Okay, he knew that calling rock bands by the names of Norse gods had been done before - there was Odin, for a start - but no-one else had actually carried the theme through to the band itself.

  Dave had been in two minds over their name; Valhalla would be pretty good, too. Valhalla, the majestic hall where Norse gods were celebrated upon their glorious deaths! Then he'd decided that would be better employed as the title song of the first album, instead. 'Thor at Valhalla'. Yeah!

  "Look, we haven't got to take it that far - we'll look like a right load of idiots if we're all on stage in horned helmets," Dave said, "but maybe Boz could wear one. People expect the drummer to be a bit of a character, don't they? Like Keith Moon, right? We can wear animal skins and those boots with leather laces tied round our legs, though; I looked at some pictures on the internet. We could get someone to make them for us."

  "Yeah," Shane said, and rubbed his chin. "My sister could knock something up, she can do that dressmaking stuff." He grinned. "The Vikings, right, they wore skirts, didn't they? Well, I haven't got any problem with getting the old pins out, but I don't reckon Ritchie should. You seen his? Proper knobbly knees contest standard, it's frightening!"

  "Sod off," said Ritchie.

  "Look, we can fine tune later," said Dave. "I just wanted to run it past you. See what you think of the idea."

  "Run it up the flag pole and see if anyone salutes it?" said Ritchie, and laughed. "That's what our Pete says. He loves all that management speak garbage. So, this is a brainstorming session, right? Are we doing some blue sky thinking?" He laughed again. "Prat!"

  "Yeah, okay, Ritchie," said Dave. "So, it's a goer, then?"

  Shane lit a cigarette and stretched out his legs. "Could be. But what about the music? Nothing too heavy, right? The birds don't go for it. Just cover versions, I reckon."

  Dave took a deep breath. "No. That's what we're not going to do. We carry the Viking theme right the way through. If we're going to be more than just a pub band, we've got to do our own material." He coughed. "I've written a couple of songs already."

  "What, like the one that got you chucked out of Critical Mass?" Shane said, and grinned. "Sorry, mate, only jesting! What are they about, then? Raping and pillaging and all that?"

  "I fancy a bit of a pillage, me," said Ritchie. "You for another, Dave?"

  "Cheers." Dave opened the can of lager that Ritchie handed to him. "I've started three, actually," he said. "One of them is, like, dead commercial. It's about a warrior who falls in love with a girl from one of the villages he's burning to the ground. It's called 'Saved'." He felt himself grow slightly hot. "It's - well, I reckon in a couple of years' time it's going to be on those 'Fifty Greatest Rock Anthems' compilation albums. It's the best thing I've ever written."

  Shane leant forward and slapped him on the back. "Nice one, mate! Yeah, let's go for it." He grinned. "Well, it'll give us something to do, won't it? Could be a right laugh, too. You in, Ritchie?"

  "Yeah. Don't have much choice, do I?"

  "No! To Thor, then!" said Shane.

  "To Thor," said Ritchie, with somewhat less gusto, though he raised his can of Carlsberg Export in agreement.

  "I know!" said Shane. "We can all have Viking names! Like, Stig and Olaf!" He slapped his thigh and threw back his head with laughter. "Yeah! I'm going to be Stig Goldenhair! Classic!"

  "You're having a laugh," said Ritchie, "we have actually got to live here, when we're not prancing around on stage in fur rugs, remember."

  "Yeah, I was only kidding! As if, eh?"

  Dave Bentley felt himself grow hot again. He hadn't actually got to that bit.

  He'd already planned his first interview in the NME.

  Not just a gimmick - Lars Erikson of Thor speaks out about his previous incarnation as a Viking warrior!

  Perhaps he wouldn't tell them about that, not just yet.

  CHAPTER ONE

  A week earlier

  Dave Bentley put his hand in the inside pocket of his leather jacket and found a Harley Davidson where he'd hoped to find twenty Marlboro Lights.

  He'd bought it from Absolute Bargains on the market square, for three pounds ninety-nine, the day before. Damn. Fancy forgetting to leave it. Janice didn't like their son to have cheap toys, but he'd hoped she might make an exception in this case. Maybe not, the mood she was in today.

  Dave considered going back, then reconsidered. Time on his own, in which to nurture his New Idea, was much needed. Anyway, he'd suffered enough earache from Janice that afternoon; he didn't want to give her fuel for another bout.

  "I told you not to buy him cheap macho man rubbish," she'd probably say, "and certainly not
a motorbike. He'll grow up wanting one, and then he'll get mashed up in some horrible accident." Something like that.

  Harley would love the bike, though. He loved the fact that there was a motorbike named after him, because he was Harley, David's son. He told everyone; come September, he'd be telling his friends at school, too. Harley, starting school. How had that happened so soon? The thought gave Dave Bentley a nice warm feeling inside. His boy, out in the world.

  That very subject, though, had been the trigger for today's round of arguments.

  A pre-school trip to Cut 'n' Dried on the estate was due, and Dave wanted his son's messy mop to be cut into a sort of Mohawk, leaving a long tail at the back. Janice was having none of it.

  "I don't want people to think his parents are new age hippie travellers," she said. "Next thing, the teachers will be asking us if we smoke dope in front of him. Anyway, kids don't like being singled out. They want to feel the same as the others."

  "I want him to stand out from the crowd, be an individual," Dave said.

  "Give him some credit - don't you think he'll stand out from the crowd all by himself?" Janice said. "People who really are individual don't need a wacky hairstyle to announce it to the world, anyway."

  The Mohawk conflict had been followed by several others. All those that occurred on a regular basis, plus a couple of new ones for good measure.

  "Giving Harley 'a rounded education' doesn't just mean playing James Brown to him as well as Led Zeppelin," she'd said, turning the CD player off. "How about teaching him to read and write, too?"

  "But he needs to know about the soul greats," Dave had said, "and learning to read and write is what he's going to school for, isn't it?"

  He didn't know what Janice's problem was, half the time. He did all he could for them, because he loved them. Both of them. If she'd wanted him to be around more she shouldn't have kicked him out, should she?

  Dave reached the bus stop, lit a Marlboro Light (they'd been in his jeans pocket, after all), and decided to walk. He hated getting on buses with all the OAPs, and teenage mums with their 'buggies'. Too risky to take the motor, though, in its current lack of MOT state. The day was brightening up; the two mile walk would clear his head of last night's beer and, with luck, the feeling of inadequacy that the past couple of hours had left with him.

  It was half past three. Ritchie would be in The Bull, up by the site where he worked - he always knocked off early on a Friday.

  Dave hoped a couple of ales might sort out the remnants of his hangover, too.

  "Women, you see, they just don't get men," Ritchie said. "They think they understand us, but they don't."

  "Yeah, you're right there," Dave said, already only half listening. Privately, he thought Ritchie's regular rant against women was a case of the geezer doth protest too much; if he really didn't want a girlfriend and was so happy being single, why was he always talking about them?

  "I bloody am," Ritchie said. "When you first meet them they reckon it's brilliant that you're in a band, they love going down the pub, and they're up for it whenever and wherever. But give it a year down the line, and all they want to do is stay at home, watch Coronation Street and get sprogged up. I mean, look at your Jan."

  "Yeah," said Dave. He swallowed the last of his pint. "D'you want another?"

  "Don't mind if I do," said Ritchie. "Wendy, love! Over here. Yeah, same again." He turned back to Dave. "I mean, no offence, mate, Jan's a great girl, and your Harley's a great kid, but you didn't get a say in the matter, did you? That's why I'm not getting caught. I've said it before, I know, and I'll say it again; one minute you're sauntering along, happy as Larry; you've got a gig that night, money in your wallet and some little darling in the audience who's only got eyes for you, and the next day you wake up next to a woman you don't recognise who's put on five stone, wears pyjamas to bed so you won't get any ideas, thinks more of the kids than she does of you, and wants you to pack in your music and get some shit boring job so that you can pay for her to sit on her arse and watch Jeremy Kyle all day. I've seen it happen over and over again."

  Dave yawned. "But you've got a shit boring job anyway," he said. "Everyone has. And Janice hates Jeremy Kyle." He didn't like Ritchie lumping Janice in with the rest of the evil species that was womankind, and thus to be avoided if men were to roam free, striding unencumbered across vast plains, like latter day Vikings. Ah yes, Vikings. Dave grinned to himself. His New Idea. Now was not the time, though; he'd wait until Shane was there, too.

  "My job's not boring," said Ritchie, hackles on the rise. "Bricklaying is an art form."

  "Yeah, I know." Sometimes Dave wondered why Ritchie was his mate at all. Ah. Yes. Something to do with the fact that he was a great bass guitarist - and he'd given him somewhere to live when Janice chucked him out. Dave had hated the thought of living alone and he couldn't, he just couldn't have gone back to his Mum's, especially not with her new man friend hanging around - Jingo Joe, he and Shane called him. Quotes from The Daily Express about the immigration problem provided on a daily basis.

  Ritchie was a decent sort of bloke, really. Just a bit one dimensional - which might be a problem when it came to the unveiling of Thor, he could see that, now.

  "You've got plenty of work coming up, haven't you?" Ritchie said. "Lots of bills to pay in the next few weeks, mate."

  "No worries," said Dave, "Phil's got us a new build out at Fenstanton. Should be at least three months' work, then we've got some plastering jobs and another new build in the spring."

  "Nice one," Ritchie said, and nodded. "Bit of outdoor work while the weather's still good, then indoors for the winter."

  "That's right." Dave grinned. "It'll keep me in good stead with Janice, too."

  "Ah, you see, that proves my point," Ritchie said. "When the money comes in from this current job, the first thing I'm going to do is collect the Stingray that's had my name on it for two months! She's a little beauty!" He put down his glass and did a quick 'air guitar', bowed as if to an audience, and laughed.

  Dave thought about the black Gibson Les Paul Custom after which he'd been lusting for years, and, despite himself, couldn't help feeling just a little envious of Ritchie.

  Dave Bentley was born to be a rock star. Since his elder brother made him listen to Saxon's 'Wheels of Steel' when he was eight years old, the road ahead had stretched out bright and clear.

  In 1991, when he was sixteen, he'd seen an interview with Joe Perry of Aerosmith who'd said something along the lines of "That's what I do. It's my job. I play arena rock."

  Dave Bentley's ambition in life was cemented at that precise moment. When someone asked him what he did for a living, he wanted to say not "I'm a builder's labourer" but "I play arena rock."

  His first guitar arrived on his seventeenth birthday - bugger the driving lessons his mum had wanted him to have. A second hand Tokai Telecaster. Natural wood finish with a red scratch plate. As he learned to play it, though, he discovered that he didn't just want to sit there cracking out the intro to 'Smoke on the Water', like some of his mates. He wanted to sing his own stuff. He had a pretty good voice, he reckoned - a bit like Kurt Cobain, he thought - and he could write, too. He was thrilled to find that he could think up new riffs, and lyrics. They just popped into his head, and it excited the hell out of him. When he wrote his first song, 'Voice in the Dark', he thought his chest was going to explode. He had it! He could write great rock songs! This was just the beginning! Okay, the song sounded quite a lot like Nirvana's 'Smells like Teen Spirit', but that was good, wasn't it?

  He'd experienced the same exploding chest sensation this week, when he thought up his New Idea.

  He was back on track now, having meandered from his chosen path for several years; somewhere along the line, life had got in the way of his rock 'n' roll dreams.

  Life, Janice, and Harley.

  When he first met Janice Brown he thought she would be just the latest in a long line of casual, forgettable ships that sailed his way in the ni
ght, from time to time. Of the two girls, she was the plain one - Shane always got first pick, with his pretty-boy face, long Robert Plant curls, and the sort of bare-faced cheek that girls seemed to love. Dave thought of himself as more of an acquired taste; Bryan Adams, perhaps, or maybe Kurt Cobain on a good day, although he would never bleach his hair, of course. Didn't really go with the leathers and bike image.

  He and Janice met in The Romany, where all the rockers and bikers and punks and Goths hung out, in the town centre of the medium sized fenland town of Fennington St Mary, where he'd lived all his life. Most of the ships he passed come nightfall were to be found docked in The Romany.

  Janice was a bit different, though. For only the second time in his life, and at the age of twenty-five, Dave fell in love. Totally unexpected. She wasn't even his type; normally he went for creative, sought after, confident blondes (like Alison Swan - where was she now?). If Shane hadn't had a transient hard-on for Janice's friend, they might never have met.

  By the end of the evening he and Shane both agreed that Dave had got the better end of the deal. The friend, Carolyn, had turned out to be that tedious combination of thick and opinionated, presuming her looks could carry her through, whereas Janice was not particularly noticeable, but quick witted, funny; the more Dave talked to her the more he became attracted to her twinkly green eyes, the freckles on her upturned nose, the Colgate ring of confidence that showed every time she smiled. She had lovely hair, too; chestnut brown, thick and shiny, which he hadn't noticed at first because he only looked at girls with long hair (rock stars' girlfriends always had long hair, didn't they?), but by the end of their first proper date the next night he'd fallen in love with the way her glossy fringe and neat chin-length bob framed her cute little face. A week later she told him she was in love with him, too, and from then on they were a couple: Dave Bentley and Janice Brown.