In affection distress my life briefly matches that of Simon Topping, newly free of school, living with his parents and his sister Joy in Flixton. ‘Do you mean to say that your sister is actually called Joy Topping?’ I ask. ‘Yes,’ he laughs. Soon the new motorbike rolls up at Kings Road with regularity, and I wonder what it is that he wants. I open the door and he stands before me holding up a copy of Nico’s Chelsea Girl LP. ‘Have you heard this?’ his Dana Andrews smile at full rev. ‘Translated into nine languages,’ I say, ‘... except English ...’ I trail away – not in the least bit funny. Nonetheless it’s Nico’s Chelsea Girl that fills our afternoons at Kings Road as rain batters the window, a cluttered tea-tray on the floor before us. Simon appears to be the first person who likes me for all the reasons that others usually dislike me. It had been a long hard war. It was enough just to sit there minus the usual nonsense of trying to make myself interesting.
Simon takes me to his parents’ house in Flixton. I hitch up onto the back of his bike – a fastened position of proximity that throws an entirely new light on seething hurt. Once at his house, I find that my wet shoes (for this is Manchester) have dragged acres of grass into the living room, and Simon’s mother visibly ages as she looks down at her carpet. ‘Oh, I can’t stand her,’ says Mrs Topping as a Bette Davis film began on television, ‘she always acts the same in every film.’ I’m obliged to chip in with ‘Oh? I think she’s always completely different in each film,’ so smarty-face says – having lived since the time of Socrates. Mrs Topping looks disgusted at me and leaves the room. Some weeks later Simon and I are in his grandmother’s house just off Barton Road. She has recently died, and Simon has temporarily moved in. It is a typical old Stretford semi, with grandma still very much in evidence: postwar literature, baffling knickknacks, an occasional table, all lovingly in order with that northern aura of making-do. I am quietly lost in sad thoughts when Simon smashes in with: ‘My mother says you’re a bad influence on me.’ I smile weakly. A now familiar reel is about to be unwound. ‘She’s worried that ...’ he begins, but I cut him off. ‘Ooooh, I know ... I know ... I know,’ with an exaggerated sigh that could ruin crops and kill off migrating geese. I see before me Christopher Power, a school friend who lived on gasp-worthy Urmston Lane in Edwardian lushness (it may not be now, but it was then); the house a mass of travel and reference books, and a staircase that was neither narrow nor cramped, and how he sat at the foot of the stairs one hazy Saturday after hours of picking rhubarb, and said: ‘My mother thinks you’re a bad influence on me.’ By now, I evidently know more than I know. Having accidentally managed everything in life to my own disadvantage, here we are again – with Simon Topping, journeying through yet another closing door. My mind stalled. I decided to dodge the plop of being a wearisome echo of myself, and I said: ‘She’s quite right. I AM a bad influence.’
Minutes later I am walking home – a wet heap of diffident stoop. I take the stairs at Kings Road, where Nico is always waiting for me, and I drag the river of this day’s events as Nico sings in the background like a big bale of black coming towards me through moorland mist. If I had access to a high place, I’d jump from it. Having been killed and eaten by Mrs Topping, I ponder on how I could possibly be considered a bad influence, since I am neither bad nor remotely influential. It is not as if, at this age of 18, I designed dresses under the name Violet Temper. It is not as if I sought a career in exotic dancing, or read jokes aloud at funerals. I had never even once been drunk. My main concern in life was to find somewhere that could make spectacles in less than an hour. I bored my own self into unconsciousness every single day, so how I could exert bad influence mystified me.
Nico was an unclassifiable artist and largely disregarded as a gifted amateur who took far too much refuge in horror. Her youth’s beauty dissolved into a lifelong lusty love of heroin that turned her into a shapeless object that moved along the ground like shifting smog. I meet her twice in unlit corners of Manchester danceterias, her frozen eyes wide amongst masses of deep black garments. The voice is a deadly frost that speaks only in mind-boggling twister-teasers, and you feel certain that Nico is in there somewhere, amongst the creases. The body is eighty-five parts anti-freeze and fifteen parts first-degree aitch. It is said that Nico introduced her teenage son to heroin, and, as he lay in a hospital bed having overdosed, she rigged up portable recording equipment in order to capture his last breath. Nico herself will be dead at 49, having fallen from her bicycle. Her singing voice is the sound of a body falling downstairs, and she speaks as if the hangman’s hands are at her throat. One drizzly night at a crib called Rafters, Nico hoists herself onstage in preparation. Her fortress harmonium stands center-stage like a battleship, ready to wheeze vaporized tones like the last harpooned humpback. Nico aims for her stool but misses and jigs herself sideways. She readjusts and begins the foot-pumping process of awakening her harmonium. There is no ‘hello’, and no ‘goodbye’. I treasure her four studio albums, none of which contain the faintest hint of hope.
