Archive of Our Own

The first time Joe Strummer sees Ian Curtis, he is playing an upstairs-downstairs club at a multi-venue music festival.  Joe is not quite a 101er anymore, but he isn’t anything else, either.  Ian isn’t anything at all; they are a band, they might be called Warsaw (it’s tentative at best), they aren’t signed to anyone’s label, and really,  the only reason Joe is upstairs listening at all is because tensions are beginning to run high in the basement club and he’d rather be listening to some crap local band than to his friends fighting about whose fault every standard tour-related fuck-up is, arguing about the set list half an hour before they go on, generally pissing about and pissing him right off.

It turns out that the crap local band aren’t actually crap at all.  Joe doesn’t regret checking them out; he’s sorry to leave when it’s time he was downstairs.  He remembers the band’s name for about ten seconds, but doesn’t forget the lead singer.

He sees him later that night at another club, his bandmates around him and no shortage of girls, either.  The singer reminds Joe of someone (he’s not sure who, doesn’t want to consider the matter too closely, there’s a reason he’s here to drink, not think).  He can be an idiot sometimes, though, and a few pints don’t do his IQ any favours, and so he finds himself leaning across the bar after an hour or two, shoving an indeterminate number of heavy pound coins at the bartender, and ordering “whatever he’s got.  For him.  And one for me.”  He is fairly sure that, had there been fewer coins or had he been more capable of counting his change, the bartender would have refused.  As it is, he’s drinking something horrible and pale and bitter, but he’s retained at least enough common sense (or something that vaguely resembles it) to act as though this is his usual.

The singer doesn’t speak to him that night, drink notwithstanding (or maybe that’s the reason why), and it’s not unusual these days for Joe to end his evening thoroughly frustrated, but this isn’t usually the reason why.

 

It’s several months later and he’s at another festival.  He’s definitely not a 101er anymore, left that behind with badly-written song lyrics and misplaced idealism, but the name ‘Joe Strummer’ has been around for long enough now that it gets him in places he hasn’t been invited.

He recognizes the sound immediately (thrums low and lonely over him, oddly compelling, but then, Joe is no stranger to ‘low and lonely’), takes a few minutes more to find the source.  The singer from the club is there, on a small, somewhat ramshackle outdoor stage in the almost-rain, five or ten people scattered about the seats alternately listening to the band onstage and swearing to one another about the weather.

Joe takes a seat, flimsy folding-chair plastic damp under his jeans, and pulls his jacket tighter around himself as two of the other people get up to leave.  Their loss, he thinks, don’t know real music if it hits them bang in the eardrums.  It’s fucking freezing out here and starting to rain properly, but Joe does know music, and this is worth it.

The guy isn’t just singing, though, this time; with more room to move around and more space to fill, he’s up there moving – dancing, maybe – frenetically and breathlessly and without rhythm, awkward angles to his limbs but no break in the smooth baritone voice.  It’s almost impressive, or would be if it didn’t look so goddamned ridiculous, but mostly, Joe is disappointed.  So that’s what this guy is, then – a laugh, a mockery, some young idiot who could be something, but is more interested in having a joke with his mates.  It’s a waste and a fucking shame, and Joe leaves without waiting for the set to end.

It’s his bad luck that he sees the singer again that same day, in the evening at a pub close by, and maybe he should swear off the drink altogether, because none of this ever ends well for him.  The laugh is at the other end of the bar and Joe is expecting rowdy, noisy, inconsiderate; he knows that type well (can’t say he’s never been that way himself), but what he gets instead is the ‘laugh’ sitting in front of a beer, not drinking or chatting or anything, just staring off into the middle distance and tapping a pen against his glass.

He’s been doodling; Joe steals a look over his shoulder when he goes for a refill, then another while he’s waiting, and on the third, the young man says, “You’re not subtle, you know.”

The voice catches him by surprise.  Onstage, it’s a warm baritone, full of words unspoken, promises unmade; Joe can hear something waiting behind it, and he’s intrigued.  Here, though, the statement is made in a quiet tenor, none of the commanding stage presence, and the man in front of him is suddenly much smaller.  Younger, too; Joe has been thinking of him as someone older, more accustomed to the stage, maybe fallen on harder times, but he looks barely out of his teens (can’t be, music like that, must be older) and hunches himself around his drink like he’s trying to avoid the world.

“What are you drawing?” Joe asks; it’s not a question he’d have presumed to ask the man on the stage earlier today, nor is that man someone he would have been interested in giving the time of day, but none of this is quite what he was led to anticipate.

The younger man looks down at the creased bar napkin, covered in thin, jagged lines.  “Music,” he says simply, and Joe doesn’t ask for clarification.  He can see it.

“Have a drink?”  It’s a stupid question, the man isn’t drinking the one he’s got, but he says, “yeah, all right, then,” anyway and slides over one so there’s room for Joe to grab the bar stool next to his.

“Joe,” he offers, because there isn’t anything else to say, he wants to try, ‘I like your work,’ or the less-dignified ‘you’re fucking brilliant out there, man,’ but he knows he comes on too strong, especially where music is concerned, so instead he’s just sliding money across the bar again (this time with decent control of his faculties) and settling in on an uncomfortable bar stool in an uncomfortable pub as the man next to him says, “Ian,” and halfway grins, but not quite.

He decides it’s a start.

“You have some pretty fucking slick bass lines,” he says, then immediately congratulates himself on sounding like a complete arse.  Slick bass lines?  “Where d’you get those?”

“In my head,” explains Ian.  “I don’t have to write them, it’s all already there.”

“Lucky,” Joe begins, and manages to stop himself adding the automatic ‘bastard’ to the end of it.  “Some of us got to write all of it ourselves.”  Unafraid, he lets a little of his accent slip into the words; he’s a rock musician, not a boarding-school toff, and he does write his own music and it’s no piece of piss.

“Get a band, like,” Ian says, and Joe doesn’t miss the Northerner in him, either, answer to his challenge – are we being real here?

“Had one,” says Joe.  “Didn’t work out.”

They finish the night with Ian sketching out 101ers songs on Joe’s napkin in impossibly fine lines, all the ones Joe is most proud of (and Ian doesn’t ask, chooses them all himself) drawn out in thin blue Biro and ending with a jagged twitch where Ian’s hand trembles at the end of each line.  Joe doesn’t touch his beer and Ian doesn’t notice his, and when they’re booted out into the chill night at two o’clock in the morning, Joe almost forgets his union jacket, but he doesn’t leave behind his battered napkin.

Joe is back in the same pub the next night, and the night after that, and the night after that.  Ian isn’t.

 

He goes on playing, sometimes on his own, sometimes with the disaffected sort-of-101ers, because Joe doesn’t know what’s good for him or when to call it quits and he can’t keep himself away from the stage.  It’s at one of those gigs, watching a bunch of young punks tear up the stage to open for him, when he’s cornered by Mick Jones (irritatingly good-looking, also irritatingly decent fellow) and Bernie Rhodes (thankfully, neither) and they have a proposition for him.  He’s got two days to decide if he’s going to keep pissing about picking at his guitar with the not-quite-101ers or if he wants to do this for real.

A few mad weeks later, Joe is the lead singer for the Weak Heartdrops (for about five minutes), then the Psychotic Negatives (for about ten), and then, finally, The Clash.

Something just sits right about it when he says it to himself, fingering box chords on his guitar and humming songs that don’t exist yet.  Something just fits.  The Clash.

He gets a postcard in the mail, picture of Salford and no writing, just a scrap of a dictionary page torn out and Sellotaped to the front.  “Joy division,” it reads, “noun, slang; an area in Second World War concentration camps where female prisoners offered services to the guards.”  There’s no return address, either, just “Ian Curtis” in spindly blue letters and a Manchester postmark.

He has no fucking idea what it means.  He isn’t meant to answer, either, that much is obvious, but Joe is shit at playing by the rules and so somehow he’s mailing off four tickets to The Clash’s debut performance less than a month away.  “Ian Curtis,” he writes, and “Joy Division” and “Manchester,” and maybe it won’t work, but maybe it will.

 

When they play their first show, they’re not ready.  Mick’s chords are loose and lacking drive; Paul’s only been playing bass three months and it bloody shows; they might as well not have a drummer back there for all the rhythm he keeps (actually, that’s not fair, he’s all right really and it isn’t his fault none of them follow his lead); and Joe.  Well.  Joe spends the entire first half of the gig scanning the crowd for old eyes in a face far too young for this scene, and the entire second half thanking gods he doesn’t believe in that Ian hasn’t come to see this.

The next postcard he gets has a Sheffield postmark and the words “Nice work” in blue pen on the back.

“Fuck,” Joe says to his guitar, and spends the rest of the day lying on his back on the bed, staring at the ceiling and almost writing lyrics.

 

They don’t play again for some time.  Joe doesn’t get any postcards (but then, he hardly goes home to check the post), Mick finds his feet and a wicked sense of humour Joe has never seen before, Paul figures out what the strings on his instrument are for, and they resolve some ‘artistic differences’ in the percussion section by finding themselves a new drummer.

“This,” Bernie declares after several weeks, “is almost a band.”

Mick throws a pick at him.  Joe takes Paul’s bass out of his hands, frowns at it, and plays his fingers up and down the frets, eyes closed and thinking of rainy afternoons and empty plastic folding chairs and a commanding voice that gets into his head and works its way out through his fingers into rhythms that don’t belong to him.

 

In the middle of August, they’re in Camden at the studio.  Theoretically, they’re rehearsing.  What they’re actually doing is sweating over slippery instruments in a room without air conditioning, box fan rattling on the floor in front of them and doing absolutely nothing.  Joe is sitting in front of the microphone because standing is too much effort and Mick, who has a flair for the dramatic, is spread-eagled beside him, head on Joe’s knee and one limp hand flung over his guitar.

“I know what’ll cheer you lot up,” says Bernie.

“A break?” asks Tops, who’s draped over his drum kit like it’s feeding him his life’s blood through a tube.

“A day off?” suggests Paul from the coolest corner of the room, where he’s crammed in trying to catch every last gasp of a draught.

“A bloody window unit?” growls Mick from the floor, without looking up.

“A show!” announces Bernie, and Joe automatically puts out a hand to stop Mick murdering him wholesale.  He can’t stop him from muttering, though, and if looks could kill, Bernie would be long gone.

“Go on, then,” he says, and Bernie sets up a plan for a week Friday and tells them all to invite their mates.  “Not too many,” he’s careful to warn.  “I’m having proper people, too.”

Joe sends one invitation.  Honestly, he can think of three people he’d consider inviting, and one of them’s been dead six years and one of them’s his lead guitarist, so just the one will do.

 

Friday week Ian is there, worn shirtsleeves and scuff-kneed work trousers in stark contrast to the semi-respectable suits most of Bernie’s ‘proper people’ are wearing.  Joe doesn’t care, he’s in Bernie’s idea of punk rock chic himself, he’s just glad of a chance to play for Ian without being complete shite.  Ian’s already heard that.

The 101ers were a good gig; Joe’s forgotten what it’s like to play for someone he admires and not have complete command of the stage.  The Clash are new, though, untested except for that rush job up north last month, and Joe’s – not worried, his bandmates are damn fine musicians, or so he tells himself – he’s just not used to this level of uncertainty, is all.

He needn’t have worried.  Someone’s been doing something right, or all those nonexistent musical gods have had their eye on The Clash, because it’s fucking brilliant.  Not 101ers brilliant; not London SS brilliant; not even Sex Pistols brilliant, and that’s what got them going in the first place.  No, this is new, it’s revolutionary, it’s something none of Bernie’s people has ever heard before, and the studio shakes when they play and explodes when they’re done, half the audience shouting at once and the other half frantically scribbling in notebooks and on scrap pieces of paper.  Joe, so bloody grateful he can’t even talk properly, hazards a look at Ian on the edge of the makeshift seats Bernie’s set up.  He’s sitting quietly, eyes half-closed like he’s still listening, and Joe swallows and focuses on something else (there are enough people clamouring for his attention), because it’s too much.

After, Mick claps a hand on his shoulder and says, “Come on, then, we’re all going down Louise’s to celebrate.”  He’s calmer now, not whooping and making grandiose statements like they all were earlier, and Joe owes him one for that, because it’s been a hell of an evening.

“Bring along my friend here?” he asks.  “Mick, this is Ian.”

Mick gives him an odd, appraising look, but they shake and Mick takes Ian ’round the studio to introduce him.  Somehow, though Joe doesn’t remember most of the walk, they make it to Soho without losing anyone.  Louise and her half-dressed doorman don’t ask any questions, which is good because Paul and Ian aren’t twenty-one and the rest of them are barely there, but Club Louise rarely turns away musicians looking for a good time, and especially not young people who are unattached, attractive or both.

The lighting’s awful, so dim they can hardly see; Paul reckons it’s deliberate and Mick admits it would make it a hell of a lot easier to pull if you didn’t have to look the person you were taking home in the eye.  Paul says that’s not quite what he meant, and Mick smacks him up the back of the head and says he knew that, idiot. 

Ian orders a beer with a toff Dutch name and ignores it quietly in the corner, asking Paul questions about his bass.  Joe sits on the other side of him with black coffee (or some approximation thereof) and listens to Ian on his right and Mick on his left without joining in on either conversation until Mick asks him about a key change he threw in on a whim earlier and suddenly they’re all talking over one another about music.

Their waiter has a lisp, just like the doorman, and Mick comments to Joe, “You fit right in here, mate, all accent and funny r’s,” and Joe, who has been going to Louise’s for years, mutters, “You’ve no idea.”  Mick doesn’t catch it (Joe wasn’t meaning for him to, wasn’t really meaning for anyone to, he’s tired), but Ian’s gaze sharpens and he looks sidelong at Joe for a while, twirling a ballpoint pen between his fingers.

Joe’s on might-be-coffee number two and everyone else is on probably-beer number three when Ian leans over just a little and asks in a low voice how late he’s planning on staying.

His whole brain freezes up for a moment at that, then kicks back into gear long enough for him to string something together about no real plans and going home whenever they run out of energy and then he’s about to say something else when he notices Ian’s stopped listening.

“Er,” he says, “sorry,” because he runs his mouth when he’s (nervous) (unsettled) awkward, which happens a lot, and then, “Ian?” when he still doesn’t answer.  The pen in Ian’s hand has gone slack and he’s staring off into nothing, but when Joe carefully nudges his elbow and tries again, “Ian?”  his head snaps up and he says “What?  I’m fine,” which Joe hasn’t asked, but was about to.

“Sure?” Joe asks, and Ian waves him off, “yeah, yeah, just tired, long day, want to get out of here?” and Joe, who was about to press the issue (knowing when to stop is not one of his strong points), is derailed.

He manages to figure out how to say “all right, then,” without sounding like a complete fool, then drops an arm around Mick’s shoulders to let him know he’s leaving, he’s done for the night, so’s Ian, and they all end up heading out into the night together because Louise’s closes down at three o’clock anyway.

The others hop the night bus back; Joe waves a hand vaguely in an I’m-off-the-other-direction way and starts walking.  Ian, close behind him, runs a hand through his roughed-up hair and mumbles something about ‘really tired’ that Joe doesn’t entirely catch, but enough to slow his steps a bit and walk closer, so there’s something for Ian to lean on if he needs it.

He’s not sure where they’re going.  He’s got a flat up Kilburn way, but he doesn’t know where Ian lives (Salford, he thinks, and there’s no way in hell anyone’s walking to Manchester at this hour) and even if he did, he doesn’t think Ian is going there tonight.

“Staying over mine, then,” he says and it’s sort of a question, but not really, and Ian blinks a few times, says “yeah” and “if you like” and Joe likes, he likes a lot.

It takes them the better part of two hours to get back to Joe’s; Ian is asleep on his feet when they get there and the midnight sky has gone to greys and dim colours without a name.  Joe hasn’t really been thinking more than about five minutes ahead, so for lack of planning and lack of either of their being awake enough to care, he deposits Ian on the narrow mattress (there’s no bed, just that and a pile of blankets and worn records) and flops face-down beside him, jacket and all.

 

In the morning (such as it were, being well past noon when he rouses himself), the door to his flat is hanging open, the blankets are in a tangled mess at the foot of the bed, and Ian Curtis is asleep with his head mashed into Joe’s sorry excuse for a pillow and his arm across Joe’s back.

He’s going to need coffee, badly, but fuck if he’s moving right now.  Caffeine can wait.

Next time he looks over (might be five minutes, might be an hour), Ian’s looking back and shit, Joe hasn’t planned this part either.  He’s about to open his mouth and deliver absolute bollocks (he is, he can feel it in the back of his brain) when Ian pulls an apologetic grimace and says, “Sorry about all that.”

Joe isn’t sorry.  Ought he to be?  He’s not, he doesn’t want Ian to be, he doesn’t particularly want to wake up, and he would really like to know where he’s gone off the rails so he can go back to the bit with Ian’s arm over him and the sun not in his eyes and the telephone not ringing –

“Fuck off, Bernie,” he says, rolling off the mattress to grab the handset.  “Rehearse tomorrow.”

He’s expecting indignance; what he gets is a resigned chuckle.  “That’s what Mick said.”

“Take a hint, then, yeah?  Go back to bed.  See you tomorrow.”

“Monday,” says Bernie.  “See you Monday.”

“Right,” and he drops the handset on top of the stack of records, fumbles around until he finds the cord, and unplugs the phone altogether.

“Dedicated to your craft,” Ian grins, and Joe says “fuck off” to him, too, and then, “no, don’t,” and shoves his head under the pillow so he stops bloody talking before he’s any more of an idiot.

“Wasn’t planning on it,” Ian mutters, and doesn’t.

“So,” Ian asks him much later, when the sun has moved and Joe hasn’t, “you’re not,” he hesitates, “bothered, like, by,” and that’s about where he gives up on his sentence and gestures to the two of them, stretched out side-by-side on the mattress.

“Um,” Joe replies articulately.  “No.  D’you want me to be?”  They haven’t done anything (have they? shit, was he drunker than he thought last night? he doesn’t remember anything, not that he’d mind, he just can’t dredge anything untoward out of the dark corners of his brain, or at least, nothing that wasn’t there before), they’re just two blokes who fell asleep after a night out, he isn’t sure what there is to be bothered about (unless it’s the fact that they haven’t done anything, which bothers Joe rather a lot, actually).

“I’d rather you weren’t,” says Ian, and cracks that not-quite-grin again, the one with something else behind it that Joe can’t exactly place, the one that makes him half intrigued, half nervous all at once.

They get up sometime in the afternoon, not bothered with clocks or reasonable human hours of existence.  Joe makes coffee, Ian goes through all his records (they put on The Doors and talk about David Bowie), they discover that Joe’s flat is completely empty of food, and end up deciding not to care because Ian’s had an idea and is scribbling frantically on all Joe’s old takeaway receipts while Joe pretends to pick at his guitar and instead watches Ian concentrate.

He leaves when it starts to get dark again, wearing a borrowed jacket and rumpled, two-day-old clothes, scraps of paper stuffed into every pocket and his fingers stained with blue ink.  Joe doesn’t watch him go; he stares at his guitar and thinks until the record on the turntable scratches and squeals, then unseats the needle and thinks some more, head in his hands.

“What the fuck was that?” he finally demands, and gets about as much answer from the guitar as he was expecting.

 

Monday, Bernie’s got a stack of newspaper clippings for them, waving them about excitedly and asking everyone, “Have you seen this?  Have you bloody seen this?”  His favourite is the one about scaring the Sex Pistols shitless, and that’s also the one Joe gets in the mail on Tuesday morning, taped to a postcard with no writing and no picture and “Ian Curtis” in failing blue ballpoint on the upper left corner.

Bernie has a new gig for them almost every day now; they’re booked through to the end of the year and all of them are working themselves to the bone for it.  They’re in the studio every day they’re not playing and some days they are, Joe spends his evenings with the phone unplugged, writing, and he and Mick develop a kind of strange telepathy where the music and the lyrics appear practically simultaneously.

Two weeks from their studio performance, The Clash open for the Sex Pistols in Islington.  The rest of London see what the critics at the studio saw days ago and the hithertofore nonexistent punk scene goes mad.  Joe takes it all in, even as reviewers and fans are fighting in the streets (literally, in some cases), but he’s not really there for the sturm und drang, not interested in hearing his music boiled down to cash value per annum as Bernie fends off fervent label scouts.  He’s there to sing, and when that’s over, he’s there for a familiar figure on the sidelines and both halves of a grin this time as Ian says, “Pretty fucking slick.”

Joe refuses to countenance that with a response.

Ian comes out with them again that night, down to Sombrero (which isn’t called that at all, but nobody bothers with the real name) and back to Joe’s afterward.  He’s in much better spirits than he was two weeks ago, energetic and opinionated and Joe’s not seen this side of him before, but he’s not complaining when Ian catches hold of him by both shoulders and demands, “Do you see?”  Joe, who’s kept up with most of Ian’s torrent of thoughts if perhaps not all, says that he does, and Ian laughs delightedly and kisses him between the streetlamps where the shadows hide his eyes.

Joe’s fucked after that; he can’t even try to deny it.

Somehow they make it back to his flat without being mugged or murdered, and Ian’s still talking, something about guitars being all wrong for something or other, so Joe shuts him up with one hand braced on the wall beside Ian’s head, the other gripping the heavy fabric of his shirt.

Joe is the first to wake up the next morning, coming to his senses in a twisted tangle of blankets that’s warmer than it should be.  Ian is curled around him, head buried in the blankets, breath warm against Joe’s skin, and Joe does the only thing he can think of.

“Fuck.”

Ian uncurls a little, just enough to meet his eyes.  “‘s wrong?” he mumbles and Joe can feel the words as he says them.

Shit, he hadn’t realized Ian was awake, and what time is it?  The sun’s up, the clock hasn’t been right in weeks, and – “Nothing, I just – ”  There’s the phone, he finds the cord and plugs it in and it immediately starts ringing.  No surprise there.

“Where the bloody hell are you, Joe?  Half the morning gone, all London beating down my door to get to Joe Strummer, and what do I say to them all?  Sorry, he’s having a bit of a lie-in?”  Bernie is less than thrilled; his voice is shrill and panicked down the phone line, he wasn’t expecting this (none of them were), and where the hell is his phenomenon’s frontman?

“I’ll be there in a quarter hour, Bernie,” Joe promises.  “Tell them I was writing, that ought to hold ’em for a bit.”

“Just get down here, all right?”

Joe’s side of the conversation is obvious, even if Bernie hadn’t been loud enough that Ian could hear every word he said.  “I’ll, er,” he says, dragging a half-buttoned shirt over his head.  “Go, then.”

Joe wants to tell him he can stay if he likes, wants to tell him Bernie can wait, wants to tell him he doesn’t mind if Ian spends the day in his dingy flat, playing his old records and writing music and drinking whatever shilling-a-bottle gut rot he finds in the cupboards.  He wants to tell Ian that, wants to come home after rehearsal and find him still there, jagged lines and scribbled words on every bit of paper in the house, but right now this thing between them, whatever it is, is still only half real, at nighttime in the hazy glow of downtown streetlamps and the darkness of his unlit room, and if he tries to bring it out into the light, there won’t be anything there.  He’s never felt like Ian was a part of ordinary life; he’s something more, music and manic energy and fingers that tremble and trace up Joe’s ribs underneath his shirt, but at night, only at night.

So he doesn’t say anything and they part without a word, Ian back to Salford with a look in his eyes that Joe can’t decipher, Joe to the studio to put out the latest fire The Clash have started on the London music scene.

 

They matter.  It’s the first time any of them has, and it’s a strange, giddy feeling, like breathing in too much air at once and having nowhere to put it.  Bernie signs them with a record label for an amount of money that makes Mick go quiet and Joe feel ill; they don’t see one another for three days afterward.  Joe spends most of it at home with his head in his hands, and on the fourth day, Mick shows up at his door in an old denim jacket and says softly, “Come on, Joe, we got music to record.”

He’s right, and so Joe shoves his arms into the jacket Mick is holding for him and they make their way through damp, slushy streets to the studio.  There’s a postcard waiting for them when they get there, addressed to The Clash this time instead of Joe, the last sputtering gasps of a dying pen scratching out the words “well done, the lot of you” onto a newspaper clipping about their signing.

Joe still isn’t sure he’s happy about it, but it seems less like selling out when he knows Ian approves.

 

In March, they put out a single.  Joe writes it, Mick makes it music, and they sing it together, sharing the one good microphone.  Ian comes down from Manchester for the release and spends the night at Joe’s, lying awake in the darkness without talking until Joe gives up on sleep and they both watch the headlights from Kilburn High Road slide silently across the ceiling.  Ian doesn’t say anything, but he’s shaking, and Joe’s jacket and both arms around him do nothing to make it stop.

In April, there’s an album, a proper one.  They call it after themselves because that’s what London’s looking for, let Bernie clap them on the back, then hoist him up onto their shoulders, because he’s a decent chap even if he isn’t in the band.  They go out on the town to celebrate, bar-hopping around Soho until all the lights go dark, and Ian isn’t there.  Joe doesn’t say a word about it, doesn’t mention his absence or a telephone call on a borrowed phone at Louise’s, “Salford 891, please, Ian Curtis,” but there’s no answer.  Mick sits close to him all evening and glares at Topper when he starts to ask where Joe’s mate is.

In May, there’s a show at the Electric Circus.  It’s not The Clash playing, it’s Warsaw’s debut performance and they’re opening for the Buzzcocks.  Pete, from the headline band, gives Joe a wave; they know one another fairly well and though there’s been some tension between the two bands, they’re getting on all right at the moment.  Joe waves back, but it’s not Pete he’s here to see, and he’s distracted searching the buzzing crowd for a slight, serious young man he hasn’t seen in far too long.

He stands at the edge of the floor in Ian’s accustomed spot, relief palpable when the band show up onstage and Ian’s right there with them as if Joe’d just seen him yesterday.  They’re jokey, keyed-up, smiles too bright and eyes darting, but Joe knows that feeling and understands.  He still gets that way before shows, anticipation of crowds and rhythms and electricity almost too much even after four years of doing this full-time.

Unlike Pete, Ian doesn’t wave; his eyes don’t meet Joe’s until halfway through their set and when they do, there’s a wildness in them that Joe isn’t used to.  He hasn’t ever watched Ian play like this before, though, in front of an audience with his band and his music and his moment, and he doesn’t care about anything right now but the music, because everything that frenzied performance in the rain promised over a year ago is here now, in the low voice that curls hot around Joe’s insides and the relentless beat that threatens to leave him behind, gasping in syncopation as he tries to keep up.

The bands pack up together after the show; Joe doesn’t ask, just pitches in, because they are all the disowned children of London’s rock empire and nobody is going to do it for them.  He gets a scattered round of thanks, a few pats on the back from the Buzzcocks and a couple of curious looks from Warsaw (who know who he is, but not why he’s here), and then he’s expecting them to want to go out like they always do in London.  They do; it’s Pete who says, “Well, boys, where we off to tonight?” but Ian, standing over someone else’s guitar case, says something about a headache and needing to work.  Joe might have said something, but Ian’s bandmates gather around him (“all right, mate?” “need anything?” “run you home if you like,”) and he dismisses all of their concerns with a shake of his head.  “Nah, go on, then,” he tells them, “I’m done.  You go.”  Maybe they can’t hear the strain in Ian’s voice, casual tone clearly forced, but it’s glaringly obvious to Joe.

They’re reluctant, but in the end they do go, leaving Joe and Ian alone at the back of the club with heavy black instrument cases and boxed-up amplifiers and a promise to “bring you back one in the morning, Ian, we look out for our own.”  When the sound of their boots on the club floor has faded, Joe looks up from the Shergold guitar he’s admiring and catches sight of Ian’s face, and the guitar’s forgotten instantly.

“Hey,” he says, “you all right, then?” because Ian’s gaze has sort of gone off somewhere over Joe’s head, he’s staring at nothing, he looks absolutely exhausted, and Joe feels like he ought to be catching him to stop him from falling or something, except that he’s not falling, he’s just staring.  There’s a slow tic under one eye, barely-perceptible twitch in the muscle that disappears when Ian suddenly shivers, looks around wildly for a second, then makes eye contact with Joe as though he hadn’t realized there was someone there.

“All right?” Joe repeats, really worried now, and Ian shrugs and manages to muster a crooked grin.

“Yeah, fine, great,” he says, turning away so their eyes don’t meet.  “Like I said.  Massive headache, that’s all.  You know.”  He gestures to the disassembled trappings of the show they’ve just played, lights and wires and scattered bits of sound equipment.

“Sure,” says Joe, who doesn’t.  He doesn’t get headaches after shows, not unless he’s an idiot and brings them on himself.

Ian does, though; he’s rubbing his temples, sitting on one of the speaker boxes and looking utterly destroyed.  He’s also looking at Joe again, waiting for him to say something, waiting to see where they’re going from here.

“Right,” Joe says, because he doesn’t like the look of Ian’s weak grin and bloodless face.  “We off down yours, then?  Or – ”idiot, Joe, he curses himself as realization hits – “you want me to sod off home, I can do that, no need to – ”

“Yeah,” says Ian.  “’round yours sounds good.  Can I come?” and somehow, even though they’re already in Manchester and nowhere near Joe’s bit of London, they find themselves on a night bus to the High Road station, Ian half-asleep against Joe’s shoulder and mumbling something about stars into the collar of his shirt.

Ian’s hands are cold when they get to Joe’s flat, fumbling with the buttons of his shirt until Joe says, “here, let me,” and unfastens them for him.  He can feel Ian’s heart beating through the thin fabric of his crewneck, half again as fast as Joe’s, and he can’t help but think of the man onstage that evening, fire and fury, and the way that Ian, right now, looks nothing like that man.

He falls asleep with his arms locked around Ian, face pressed to the warm skin of his shoulder, just above the collarbone, where he can still feel Ian’s racing heartbeat.

 

The Clash are playing all over now, sharing days in broken-down tour vans and nights in tiny hotel rooms, sometimes only one between the four of them because the budget doesn’t always stretch to two.  When they’re not playing or rehearsing, Joe and Mick are writing, heads close together in the back seat of the van or huddled in a corner of an unfamiliar green room in an unfamiliar town.  Sometimes they talk to kill the time or beat back the lack of inspiration caused by long nights and monotonous scheduling.  Sometimes they argue.  Once, Topper and Paul start a knock-down, drag-out fight in one of the cargo vans pulling their gear, not because they’re not getting on, just because they’re bored out of their fucking minds.  Joe joins in, gets a little roughed up, bloodies Paul’s nose good-naturedly, and it’s Mick who pulls them apart and asks them what the bloody hell they’re thinking before hauling Joe off to one of the other vans with him and leaving Tops and Paul to tidy all the things they’ve knocked about.

Joe makes jokes at his bandmates’ expense and his own.  He drinks in the evenings when they do, stays in his room when they do, goes out when they do.  He matches them step-for-step and stage-for-stage around England, causing minor trouble and pleasing major crowds, and he and Mick turn out material like it’s the only thing they’re doing.  Bernie has a small heart attack one night when he doesn’t recognize anything on the set list, but Strummer and Jones don’t disappoint, and after that, he stops asking questions and lets them run the musical side of things their own way.

He also rings Ian most nights, Salford 891 from phones in hotel lobbies all over the country, and sometimes Ian answers, and sometimes he doesn’t; Warsaw are busy recording at a studio in Manchester and it’s long days and longer nights for them as well.  Once, a voice he doesn’t recognize picks up the phone and says, “wait a minute, is this Joe Strummer?” and when he says it is, there are cheers and congratulations from the other end, where all of Warsaw are apparently having a drink at Ian’s flat.  Most of the time, though, it’s Ian’s soft tenor that picks up, and he and Joe talk for a minute or two before one of them is pulled away to other duties.

The two of them are sitting up one night, late enough that they can hear the others snoring one wall away, when Mick stops in the middle of setting Joe’s latest to music to say, “You know, I had a mate just like you once.”

“Yeah?” says Joe, pausing mid-word with his pen above the paper.

“Yeah.  Mad as a fuckin’ hatter, both of you,” and Mick tells him about being an idiot teenager (Joe remembers; if Mick thinks he was awful, he hasn’t heard many of Joe’s stories yet), tells him about school and clubs and drinking too early and staying out too late, tells him about pissing off the old men at the billiards tables and about living from moment to moment with no better friends than Robin and his old guitar, and Joe sits and listens and takes it all in.

“Rotten to the core,” Mick says, “the lot of us,” and Joe nods in agreement.

When he finally rouses himself from his seat on the floor, back against the wall, to collapse onto one of the narrow hotel beds, Mick puts down his pen and says, “Oi, Strummer.”

He stops, turns.  Mick, taller than he is, is right up close on his left, and they both look equally surprised when he leans in and kisses Joe on the mouth, quick and determined.

Joe stares at him for a full minute before he finds words, and when he does, the word he finds is, “Er.”

Mick waits.

“Look,” he says, trying to find a way to say what he means without saying anything, trying to figure out how to explain about postcards with scratchy handwriting in blue ink and too-short nights in his squalid Kilburn flat and a baritone voice that makes him want to put away the microphone forever, “look, I – ”

“’s all right,” Mick interrupts.  “I didn’t mean anything by it, Joe, fuck off.”

Joe doesn’t ring Ian that night, doesn’t know what he would say if he did.  Instead, he sits up in the dimly-lit hotel corridor all night, doesn’t sleep, and writes a song for Mick.

He doesn’t know what it means that that’s how he spends his night.  Maybe it doesn’t mean anything, just like Mick didn’t mean anything.  Maybe that’s it.

 

He finds Mick in their room next day after breakfast (which, for everyone else in England, is a late lunch) and hands him the sheets of hotel stationery, scrawled block capitals smaller and smaller as he tried to cram all of it onto the few pages he had.  It’s part song, part failed apology (and he doesn’t know why he’s the one apologizing, but it’s Mick, and that makes things matter), and Mick takes the papers from him and tucks them into a back pocket with barely a nod.

That’s all right.  Joe’s not expecting him to read them straight off, anyway.

When he figures out Joe isn't going anywhere, sitting up on the bed and fingering chords on his coffee mug, Mick sighs and pulls the sheets back out to look at them.

There’s a long silence; he skims the lines, then reads them, then reads them again and mouths the words under his breath to himself, frowning as he does.  He takes his time with them, back and forth writing chord combinations above the words in tiny, neat letters.  He gets about halfway through them doing that, then stops, stares at the pages for a while, and finally looks back up at Joe, shaking his head.

“I don’t think you wrote this for us, Joe,” he says, and it’s not confused or irritated or sad; it’s just resigned.

“’course I did,” Joe says from the bed.  “We’re The Clash, aren’t we?  Who the hell else did I write it for?”

Mick holds the papers above him, then drops them on his stomach.  “Think about it,” he says, and turns his back on Joe when he walks over to the far corner to retrieve the songs he was working on before.

Joe thinks about it.  He reads over the words he’s chosen, tries singing them – first one melody, then another, nothing quite fits – then tries changing keys, changing rhythms, and, finally, dropping his voice and going over them again.

That’s when it hits, and Joe is a fucking idiot.

“Fuck,” he says aloud.  “Mick, I’m sorry, fuck, I’m sorry,” because he stayed up all night meaning to write a song for Mick, and it’s Ian he’s written it for, and he’s a complete fucking bastard who doesn’t deserve a friend like Mick.

Mick turns, about to answer, and that’s when Topper comes flying through the door, babbling something garbled about Paul and fans and come on, Joe, Mick, come on, you’re not gonna believe this.

For Joe, it’s like he’s adrift in a freezing ocean and somebody’s just tossed him a life ring; he leaps up from the bed, grabs hold of Topper’s offered arm, and almost misses Mick’s murmured admonition as he (flees) (bolts) disappears through the door.

“Don’t be an idiot, Joe,” he says, and makes no move to join them.

 

Mick doesn’t come to get them until it’s well dark outside, standing grim-faced at the front desk and handing over banknotes to bail them both out. Tops tries to thank him (Mick marches them out like prisoners to execution, which they very nearly are, and doesn’t answer); Joe has the sense to keep his mouth shut, because as angry as Mick might be at Topper, it’s nothing to the way his eyes flash when he looks at Joe.

They’ve been idiots. Right proper ones, the kind Joe thought he was too smart to ever be again. Mick has every right to be upset; Joe is pretty fucking ashamed of himself too, not that he’d presume to say it, not when Mick’s like this.

He doesn’t remember until they’re halfway back to the hotel what Mick told him last night, before everything went to hell. When he does, he drops his head into his hands (Strummer, you ought to be shot) and doesn’t look up for the rest of the ride.

When Mick finally lets up in the hotel corridor in front of their rooms, Topper, much subdued now, mutters a brief apology and ducks behind his door.  Joe hasn’t got a convenient escape like that, but then, he doesn’t deserve one, either.  He doesn’t dare try to apologize to Mick, too many disappointments in one night and frankly he’s surprised Mick even bothered to come for him; he just steps around the taller man and walks down the hallway back to the elevators.

It takes everything he has not to look back.

For the second night in a row, he doesn’t sleep. He’s feeling it, but he’s gone longer before and right now he doesn’t care; this is more important.  He slumps sideways in a corner booth in the bar, drinking coffee like a dying man in a desert, and writes. He doesn't stop; he doesn’t let his eyes close for fear they’ll stay that way; he doesn’t think about Mick, alone in their shared room for the second night in a row because Joe is a bloody useless fool. He writes, and by the time the hotel manager leans over into his booth to tell him “sorry, mate, you’ve got to go,” he’s covered the table in cheap, scratched-out napkins and he has something that might, finally, be almost right. Almost enough, for an apology, at least.

He shoves it under the open case of Mick’s guitar just before dawn, then lets himself into one of the tour vans and falls asleep in the back seat, completely wrung out.

 

They find him as they’re packing up the vans in the morning, ready to head to their next destination.  Paul wakes him up, makes him shove over so that he can cram in his bass, and then leaves him to his own devices.  Mick loads all of his things into the other van, stands next to it chatting with Topper and Bernie (so he’s forgiven one of them, at least), but when they drive off, it’s Joe’s van he climbs into, shifting Paul’s bass into the front seat without a word so he can take the seat next to Joe in the back.

The better part of an hour’s gone by and they’re on a gridlocked highway heading north when Mick pulls the stack of napkins out of his jacket pocket and says, “It’s good, this.”

Joe barely glances over.  He’s still not sure he really has the right.

“Thanks.”

He shrugs.  It’s not right that Mick’s thanking him, he’s only tried to fix what he fucked up in the first place.  Nor has he done nearly enough, but if there’s one thing the past forty-eight hours have made glaringly obvious, it’s that he’s only human and a bloody flawed one at that, and there’s only so much he can do.

There’s something else he has to say, though.

“I can’t – ” he begins, and Mick says, without needing him to finish, “I know.”

Joe hesitates for a minute before saying, “No, you don’t,” because how can he?  Even Joe doesn’t know, not really, but Mick gives him a look like he’s just been falsely accused of riding the short bus and says, “Yeah, I do, you dumb fuck.  You think nobody noticed?  We’re not all blind idiots around here, just you.”

He’s quiet for a while longer, until they’ve passed the next mile marker and traffic is beginning to clear.  Then he mans up, takes a deep breath, and says, “I can’t help – ”

“I know,” Mick says again, and the resigned note is back in his voice.  “Neither can I.”

 

They return to London, triumphant, at the height of summer.  Topper and Paul go off for a celebratory drink together and then to sleep for a week; Bernie vanishes into the studio (they start recording in ten days’ time); Mick takes a thick stack of pages and a pile of ragged napkins and looks up the next bus to West London, where he plans to sit in his flat and set things to music until he runs out of lyrics.

Joe goes to Manchester.

Warsaw have been spending their days recording and their nights playing every club in the area; they’re tired and giddy and enthusiastic and they remind Joe of The Clash this time last year.  They greet him with a round of noisy congratulations when he shows up at their studio unannounced, raising their guitars to him and asking if he wants to join them for a session.

Ian steps out from between the microphones, says “hi” to him much more quietly than his bandmates, then laughs when Joe taps on his borrowed guitar and tells him he ought to have one of his own.  Joe is full of news, things he wants to tell Ian and things he needs to and things he still has to think over first, but before he can say anything, a guy he doesn’t know comes up behind Ian and drapes an arm over his shoulders.  “Who’s this, then?” he asks, even though he can hardly have missed Joe’s name when he arrived.  “Not trying to pull our lead singer for your band, are you?”

Joe takes an instant dislike to him.

Ian, much more tolerant than hot-headed Joe Strummer, eases the fellow’s arm off his shoulders.  “Joe, this is Steve,” he says reluctantly.  “He’s drumming for us now.”

“What happened to Terry?” Joe asks, because Terry does a fine job on the drum kit and he’s standing right there in the corner.  He’s also not aggressive and off-putting, and right now, Joe considers that his primary qualification.

“Manager,” Ian tells him.  “Had to have one.”

“Yeah, you did, you wankers, you’re proper rock stars now,” grins Joe, and Ian looks away in embarrassment.  “Be hiring yourselves guitar polishers and personal arse-wipers next.”

“Fuck off, Joe,” Ian says, and smiles when, instead, Joe puts him into a headlock and drags him a bit farther away from Steve the slime.  The surprise almost makes Joe let go of him, because he’s seen Ian grin (crooked, shy, Joe can hardly take his eyes off it) and he’s seen him laugh, but this might be the first time he’s ever seen him properly smile.

Later that night over pints, Joe sits on Ian’s right and Steve sidles up on his left to insert himself into the conversation.  They’re talking about clubs in Brighton (Joe isn’t ready yet to bring up the rest of the tour) and Steve keeps chiming in with comments about gigs he’s played there with The Panik.

Ian doesn’t say anything, but he loses the easy grin he’s had for most of the night and Joe notices when the tic under his eye starts up.

“Been tryin’ to get this guy to sing for us,” Steve tells Joe.  “What you think, eh?  ‘The Panik, fronted by Ian Curtis of Warsaw.’  That voice is made for punk.”

“What I think is, find your own singer,” Joe returns.  “Ian’s got a band and it’s a fucking good one, too.”

“And who made you his manager, then?” Steve demands from Ian’s other side, tone distinctly unpleasant.  “Last I checked, you weren’t even in this band.”

“Steve,” says Ian quietly.

“Gonna let this twat make your decisions for you?  You don’t got to listen to him, Ian, he ain’t your boyfriend.”

“Swap seats with me, Ian,” is Joe’s curt response.  If this Steve fellow is spoiling for a fight, Joe’ll give it to him, but he wants to be within arm’s reach.  More importantly, he wants Ian out of it.

“’s all right, Joe, don’t.”

Joe stops dead in his tracks, fists clenched and halfway out of his seat already.  Anything else wouldn’t have halted him, but Ian’s sitting between him and Steve, not moving and asking Joe not to, either.

He sits back down.  “Late,” he mutters, not particularly feeling like bothering with full sentences.  “I’m off home, got to record in a week.”

Ian doesn’t ask if he can join him, and Joe ends up alone on the broken-down mattress in his broken-down flat, staring at the ceiling and wondering what else has changed while he was gone.  Twice, he nearly picks up the phone; the first time, he puts it down before he can do anything stupid, and the second, he’s two dials into a number before he realizes it’s Mick he’s calling and hangs the handset up like he’s been shocked.

 

He doesn’t hear from Ian for a while, and then, the night before he’s headed to the studio, the telephone rings.

“Bernie,” he acknowledges when he picks up, but the soft voice on the other end of the line isn’t Bernie’s.

“So that Steve Brotherdale,” says Ian, and Joe’s hackles are up before he’s even heard what Ian’s going to say next.

“Mmm.”

“We took him out for a bit of a drink,” Ian says, and lets the sentence hang between them.

Joe, who’s more than familiar with the slang, hopes Ian means what he thinks.  “Really?”

“Yeah,” says Ian.  “Well, sort of.”

“Sort of.”

“Sumner dropped him by the side of the road after recording to check on a puncture and we,” Ian pauses, choosing his words carefully, “might have forgotten to let him back in.”

There’s a silence, and then a startled laugh.  “Ian,” says Joe, “you left him side of the road and fucked off?  All of you?”

Ian says, “It was a majority agreement.”

“Fucking ace,” says Joe, and when Ian shows up at his flat later that night, he makes God-awful coffee in a strainer over two mugs and plays for him, covers of The Who and sacrilegious attempts at Bowie and one horribly mangled mockery of “Modern Politics,” by The Panik, which has Ian laughing so hard he’s doubled over, gripping the counter for support.

They don’t sleep.  Joe doesn’t mind.

 

Summer’s over before they have a chance to notice it, barely setting foot out of doors during the daylight hours and filling their nights with shows and obligations.  Joe takes to writing in the studio, which has proper air conditioning now.  Some nights find Mick in there with him, frowning over a guitar or a keyboard while Joe writes reams and reams of thick block capitals and Mick throws them all back at them with an exaggerated imitation of Bernie Rhodes (“an issue, Strummer, don’t write to me about all this rot, tell me what’s wrong with the world!”).  Other nights it’s Ian, who hardly makes it to London anymore now that Warsaw have got a new drummer and are tearing up the Manchester punk scene.

On nights when it’s Mick, Joe surrounds himself with papers like they’re the Berlin Wall, and Mick notices, Joe can see it, but he never says a word.  It’s not that he doesn’t trust Mick, but Joe knows he’s an idiot and more than ever where Mick is concerned, and if there’s anyone he doesn’t trust, it’s himself, so he builds walls of words because it’s better for them both this way.

On nights when it’s Ian, they lean against the far wall together and spread the papers out around them both, half in Joe’s bold handwriting and half in Ian’s barely-there scrawl.  They don’t write much on those nights; Ian’s usually exhausted, sometimes shivering so hard that Joe shuts off the air conditioning altogether, and Joe can’t keep his mind on his work, so instead he pulls Ian into his arms (uncertain but unresisting) and they fall asleep that way to the ticking of the useless studio clock that always has the minutes right but the hours wrong.

Joe doesn’t try to guess at what it means, any of it.  He knows he’s not much good at that.

 

New Year’s Eve, The Clash aren’t playing anywhere.  They’ve been flat-out for nearly three months and they’re done; Paul and Mick have had a massive falling-out, which Joe hadn’t even thought was possible, and now they’ve gone back to about three years old, Joe carrying messages between the two of them and doing his best not to relay the sniping comments that come alongside.  (To be fair, it’s mostly Paul doing the sniping; Mick tends to give instructions in as few words as possible and then get frustrated when Paul – who’s still only been playing bass a year and a half – doesn’t catch on fast enough.)

All in all, it’s time they had a break, and so they’re at the Swingin’ Apple to see Warsaw play.  It’s a terrible club, tiny and dark and full of punks who think they’re too cool for the scene and teddy boys with blindingly appalling shirts and Elvis Presley hair; Paul snatches one of the posters off the front of the club and Mick shoots him a dirty look, but says nothing to Joe.  They split off in the club, Joe for his standard front left-hand floor spot, Mick and Tops somewhere in the middle, Paul in the back at the bar, because it’s pretty obvious that neither of them can stand arguing, but both of them are about fifty times too stubborn to be the bigger man.

It bothers Joe, too, not least because he doesn’t like that Mick’s only got Topper to talk to properly now, but there’s not much he can do about it beyond passing messages and kicking Paul in the head any chance he gets (not Mick, he’s beyond having the right to do that).  So instead he’s here, pretending nothing’s wrong, pretending everyone’s getting on, burying himself in the persistent beat and the insistent pull of Ian’s vocals.

A few minutes to midnight, the band take a break.  Everyone’s clapping one another on the back, starting false countdowns, mis-remembering the words to “Auld Lang Syne,” and Joe notices that Ian’s vanished.  There’s no stage at the Apple, just an open space on the floor where bands stake their claim with speakers and amplifiers and microphone cords, hoping nobody trips over anything and disconnects it in the middle of a set.  There’s a back room, though, and as Joe’s looking around to try to find – anyone, really – that’s where Mick, standing across the room and searching the crowd the same way Joe is, points him.

No one stops him as he heads back there.  The Clash have played Liverpool before, always at Eric’s (and that’s a rivalry if ever there was one), but it’s the Apple they go to for drinks afterward, and they know him well enough here that he’s got free run of the club.  He checks a few places before he finds Ian, not in the green room where he expects, but right in the back, in the tiny entryway by the back staircase, staring out of the high safety window on the door.

“You ever feel,” Ian asks him without turning around, “like you’re just clinging to the skin of the world?  Like you might fly off any moment?”

Joe doesn’t know what to say to that.  He’s more a man for rash, hot-headed words; he doesn’t think the way that Ian does, ethereal and impermanent, all inside his own head.

After a moment, though, Ian turns to face him and shakes his head.  “Never mind,” he says.  “Back on in ten minutes.”

He is, they’re supposed to be ringing in, but suddenly it’s Joe who feels like Ian might fall off at any moment; there’s something in his eyes that isn’t in the room with them, something that might not even be within reach, and the only thing Joe can think of to bring him back to earth is to catch hold of Ian’s shoulder, turn him, and kiss him.  It’s not something they do, not really, but it feels like if he doesn’t, he’s going to lose Ian, and he’s only just realized exactly how much he is not all right with that.

When he pulls back, there’s a strange look on Ian’s face, but before he can react, it’s gone, and there’s not quite a smile in its place, but that shy duck of the head and the crease at the corners of his eyes that means the same thing.

Ian finishes the set out and then scrambles the sound equipment into its boxes along with the rest of the band; Joe goes looking for Mick and finds him at the bar with Paul, thank God for that.

“You two all right, then?”

Paul side-eyes him.  “No idea what you’re talking about, Strummer.”

He pulls Mick aside for a minute, thanks him.  Not for any reason in particular, but because of the past year, because of The Clash and because of midnight in a half-lit hotel room and because after all that, he and Mick are still friends – proper friends, best mates – and that, Joe reckons, counts for a lot.

Mick looks at him for a while and then says, “You don’t owe me anything, Joe.”

Joe says, “That’s not,” and, “You don’t,” and, finally, “Yeah, I do.  I might be a blind idiot, but even I can see that, Mick,” and walks away.

He spends the first day of 1978 in a shabby, third-rate hotel room in Liverpool, holding onto Ian for all he’s worth and hoping it helps, even a little, to keep them both in the world.

 

A month later, Joe is at a Warsaw gig at Pip’s Disco in Manchester.  He’s never been (it’s not the kind of venue The Clash usually play, and they and the Buzzcocks are in the ‘off-again’ stage of their friendship at the moment), but it looks like an all-right venue.  This delusion lasts about ten minutes, before there’s a commotion at the door and it turns out the doorman doesn’t reckon Ian’s welcome in their club.  Joe’s comment (“He’s the fucking headliner, you complete piss artist!”) doesn’t help and nearly gets him tossed as well, before Pete Hook shows up and drags Ian onto the stage about a minute before they’re scheduled to start.

They’re announced and Joe does a double-take, because somewhere between New Year’s Eve and now they’ve apparently stopped being Warsaw and started being Joy Division; suddenly, a year-and-a-half-old postcard (he’s still got it, stuffed into the sleeve of the Doors record they listened to the first time Ian stayed the night) makes sense.  He shoots a dirty look the bouncer’s way when they hit the first intro, but it fails to have an effect.  Rather, a couple of songs into the set, some tosser in a flight mac throws a punch and the whole floor is chaos.  Sumner pulls Ian toward the back of the stage; Pete goes the opposite way and smacks about a few of the worst offenders quite well before somebody stops him.  Steve Morris, from a safe distance, is trying to talk (yell) sense into them, but it’s pretty much hopeless, and before long, half the audience has been booted out the front door and the club manager is onstage, gripping Pete by the collar of his shirt and going a choice shade of apoplectic purple as he shouts.

Joy Division finish out the set, eight songs in total, largely because Joe separates Pete from the manager and grimly suggests that he join the audience for the duration.  Fortunately, he’s not completely useless with a bass guitar, and he’s spent enough time going to Warsaw’s gigs that he knows his way around the rest of the set list (or at least, he can pretend fairly convincingly).  Once they’re done, though, he hands the bass back to Pete and says, “Not a great start to your new band, mate.”

“Yeah,” says Pete.  “Not playing here again.”

“Look,” says Joe, “we play a lot of places like this.  Sometimes you got to fight.  Not this time.”

Pete considers that for a while, then shrugs.  “Yeah,” he says, “fine.  Don’t need you tellin’ me how to run my gigs, Strummer.”

“Don’t be an idiot, Hook.”

“Piss off,” but later, as they’re dragging heavy boxes of equipment out of the club’s back door, he also says, “thanks, Joe,” and he buys the first round of drinks afterward (and the second, and the third), so they’re all right, really.

 

Spring into summer, both bands are busy.  The Clash are touring again, when they’re not busy putting together material for their second album; Joy Division have somehow managed to get themselves a proper manager and are moving up in the world, playing Eric’s now when they go to Liverpool and staying in proper hotels with box springs and room service.  Joe goes to as many of their Manchester shows as he can manage, sometimes with Topper (who’s fascinated by Steve Morris’ drum technique) and sometimes alone, and Ian occasionally appears at a Clash gig, standing on the left-hand side at the front with his collar up to hide his face.

Joe takes him home after shows and tries to make him sleep, because Ian forgets to do that, and forgets to eat, too.  He’s living on coffee and adrenaline and looks it; when Joe undoes the buttons on his shirt and pulls Ian in close, he can feel ribs and spine and not much else, and the strange, faraway look in Ian’s eyes is there more and more often now.  There’s nothing he can do about it, but he runs his fingers through Ian’s hair and thinks of friends he’s had who’ve had to quit the scene because they aren’t made strong enough to handle it and he worries, and then he swallows it down so that Ian doesn’t see.

One day in September, he learns through the gossip station (Topper, who hears everything, probably because nobody notices he’s standing right next to them) that Joy Division have signed themselves to Tony Wilson’s Factory label.  He hasn’t seen Ian in a few weeks because The Clash have been recording, and he figures the in-joke might have run its course by now, but he still buys a postcard from a newsagent’s in Newcastle and mails it with “Joe Strummer” in the corner and “jolly well done” across the back.  He almost addresses it to Ian Curtis, then thinks better of it, scratches it out, and writes in “Joy Division” instead.

October, they’re both on tour; Joe borrows a car from a mate in London and drives it four hours up the M6 to see Joy Division play before he has to get stuck in on his own shows.  They’ve been fantastic lately, energetic and intense, Ian’s been singing like Joe’s never heard before and he doesn’t think the dancing is ridiculous anymore, he thinks it’s Ian, everything he doesn’t have the words or the breath or the bravery to say, and sometimes Joe has to slip out of the crowd during their sets and lean against the wall of the club in the chill air and just breathe.

It’s not like that tonight, though.  Joe can tell as soon as he walks in.  The air feels different, anticipation become anxiety, and there’s a tight feeling in his chest he can’t place until Ian walks onstage, and that’s it.  He walks.  He’s supposed to appear onstage, he’s got presence and impulsion and he’s like a riptide when he takes the microphone, but not today.  Today, he looks hollow somehow, drained and faded, and he sings like the colour’s washed out of his voice.  Joe aches.

At the end of the night, it’s not Ian he goes for; he grabs Barney Sumner as he’s packing up the keyboard and says, “What’s wrong with Curtis?”  He’s never called Ian by his last name in his life, but he’s afraid too much is coming out in his voice already and it seems less obvious this way.

Sumner shrugs at him, helpless.  “Dunno.  He’s been,” and he shrugs again, gesturing vaguely at the stage.  “Says he’s fine.”

“Right.”

“Look, we’ve ten days off,” Sumner says.  “You take him home and sort him out if you reckon you can do any better.”  The look on his face is knowing, but not in an unkind way; Joe supposes that if Mick had it figured out months ago, it’s no real surprise that Sumner’s got them sussed as well.

He sighs.  “Got a fucking tour,” he says, and it’s the first time he’s ever wished he didn’t.

“Good luck to you, mate,” Sumner tells him, and, “give us a hand, will ya?” and he and Joe carry the keyboard and all its bits and pieces out to the van, where Ian is sitting slumped on the back hatch with his head down.

Joe takes him home in the borrowed car and stays the night.  Ian sleeps nearly ten hours, but doesn’t look any more rested in the morning.

He’d rather not leave, but he was due in London two hours ago, on a tour van that’ll be his home for the next three months, so he goes.  Before he does, he finds a phone box on a street corner at the edge of Bolton and rings Pete Hook, who owes him one.

“You bloody look out for him while I’m gone, eh?” he says, not caring anymore about being obvious, because if Sumner knows, then they all do.  “I hear you’ve been fighting or like that, I swear to God I’ll have your heads, the lot of you.”

“Easy, Strummer,” mutters Pete down the line.  “I’ll look after your goddamned goldfish.”

Joe could get into it with him, but he’s not in the mood and he’s already going to be six hours late when he’s back to London, so he just says, “you fucking well better,” and rings off.

 

He telephones every night, even when they’re in Scotland or off in France.  Ian hardly ever answers (fair enough, he’s got his own tour), but when he does, he’s quiet and out-of-breath and Joe starts to wonder if he’s gotten into something he can’t handle.  He’s seen it before; he’s had a few mates, Mick’s had a few more, but Ian’s not like them, not brash and loud and over-the-top, not angry and forceful and desperate.  Not anywhere but in his music, at least.

Their second release comes out in November.  Joe’s not over thrilled with it, to be honest; he’s pretty happy with what it says and pretty impressed by the fact that his bandmates are fucking talented, but he doesn’t much like his own sound, on a borrowed guitar, or the way it’s mixed.  People go completely sack of hammers over it, though, and it’s to the point where he’s thinking they might be able to slap ‘The Clash’ on just about anything and get a good review, because they’re practically rolling in the newspaper articles Bernie clips nowadays and the critics are ringing up their London studio daily, though all they ever get is the answerphone.

All Joe’s waiting for is one review, though, summarized in a few words on the back of a postcard, and it never comes.

 

It’s late December before they’re back in London, playing the Lyceum because the clubs they’re used to aren’t big enough anymore.  The day before their first of three live shows, everyone’s off doing their own thing; they haven’t had the chance to breathe in weeks without inhaling one another, and it’s just nice to be able to do something outside one another’s pockets for once.  Not that every one of them doesn’t know where Joe’s going to be, because Joy Division are playing their first London gig that night at the Hope and Anchor.

Actually, he misses most of the show.  He’s held up by his guitar (finally repaired and he’s not spending another day on that awful hired Gibson if it kills him), then by his manager (they’ve not played a venue like the Lyceum before and Bernie’s not a sound engineer, so Joe and Mick are there until well into the evening helping him set up for tomorrow), then by the buses (fucking Islington).  When he does finally make it there, the set’s damn near over and the doorman takes his money anyway, then tells him that the band are no good.  He looks a little surprised when Joe tells him to shove it – more worry than malice – and picks his way through the sparse audience to the front left side.  Ian spots him right away, but looks irritated instead of pleased, and Joe gives up, feeling just as irritated as Ian looks because there’s no way the evening could possibly get any worse than it already is.

Still, he doesn’t leave.  He packs up with Joy Division after the show, like always; Pete and Sumner look a little nervous at first, like he’s going to take them apart for not looking after Ian as well as he thinks they ought to have, but when he just hauls in and works alongside them, Pete returns to boxing up the drum kit and Sumner offers Joe a ride back with them if he likes.  Ian doesn’t say anything at all, but Joe is farther gone than he would like to admit, so he says yes anyway.

The gear goes in the van with some of their mates, but the band are all travelling in Steve’s car.  No one seems to mind that Joe makes five and five makes for a crowded car; Barney Sumner’s under a sleeping bag shivering because apparently they dragged him out of bed ill to do the show, Steve’s focused on driving with Pete next to him in the front seat trying to navigate by torchlight, and Ian is in the middle between Joe and Sumner, still saying nothing until Joe suddenly realizes he’s shaking.

“Ian?” he asks, and then, when he doesn’t get an answer, “Ian?”  This time, Ian growls something that Joe isn’t sure is words, but he’s shaking even harder now and something’s wrong, something is obviously wrong.

“Pete,” he says.  “Steve, something’s up with Ian.”

When Pete turns, Ian’s curled over himself half-buried in the sleeping bag Sumner’s kicked off, shoulders jerking and breath coming in odd, syncopated gasps.  “Bloody hell,” he says, “you haven’t got Sumner’s ’flu, have you?” but no, he hasn’t, because Pete’s barely finished his sentence before Ian’s launched himself across the seat and is lying half across Joe’s lap in full-on convulsions.  Joe’s maybe shouting at Steve to pull over (“we can’t, we’re on the M1!”  “Steve, pull the bloody fuck over before I throw you out the car!”) and Sumner’s pressed as tightly to the far door as he can manage, and then they’ve stopped and Joe is dragging Ian out onto the hard shoulder, holding him down with Pete for assistance because one person isn’t enough, and Ian is lashing out on the ground, catching Joe across the face and Pete in the shoulder, hold him harder, someone shouts, and Joe’s doing the best he can.

It mustn’t last more than a few minutes, but by the time Ian is limp and trembling in Joe’s arms, Sumner has forgotten the ’flu, Pete’s at the wheel, and Steve is helping Joe haul Ian (lighter than all of them, though nowhere near the smallest) into the backseat.  Speed limits are meaningless; they make it to the nearest town in about twenty minutes and Joe carries Ian into casualty at Luton and Dunstable at a dead run.

They take him away, still shaking, still breathing in shallow, desperate drags, and Joe and Joy Division sit on sticky, NHS-funded plastic chairs and stare at one another.

“Shit,” says Pete, and no one has anything to add.

Under the flickering fluorescent lights, a nurse eventually appears to ask them if this has ever happened before.  Joe, Pete and Sumner all say no; Steve frowns a little and says, “yeah, once, we were sixteen, it was at a show.”  She asks about unusual behaviour, aggressive tendencies, and Joe thinks of evenings when Ian tears up the stage and nights when he lies in Joe’s arms and doesn’t sleep or speak or move.

After that, no one comes in or out for a long time.  Sumner leaves to go and be sick in the hospital toilets because for all that’s going on right now he’s still ill; Joe doesn’t bother looking up when he hears him come back, until the door swings open a second time and Mick Jones settles into the seat next to him.

“Fucking hell, Joe,” is all he says, and wraps an arm around his friend’s shoulders.  He looks as drawn with worry as any of them and Joe wonders how he got here, how he knew, but can’t bring himself to care enough to ask.

Mick isn’t like them, though; he’s the type who needs to be doing something, to be fixing things, and so after ten minutes of sitting with Joe and ten more of pacing back and forth until Barney Sumner begs him to stop, he marches up to the nurses’ station and says, “Can’t you tell us anything?  You must know by now, he’s been in there for hours!”

Impassive, the nurse says, “If you’ll just have a seat over there, the doctor will be with you as soon as he can.”

This time, Mick sits even closer to Joe and doesn’t say anything, just waits with him.

The band go home somewhere around five o’clock in the morning, because Ian doesn’t need five of them waiting for him and Sumner could use some sleep and the nurse refuses to tell them anything anyway.  Mick stays, which is damned lucky because by the time the doctor does appear, it’s light outside and Joe is only half-sensible, tired and frightened and reliving far too much of the wrong parts of the evening over and over again in his head.  It’s Mick the doctor talks to (Joe listens long enough to hear the words “epileptic seizure,” but the words don’t really take hold) and it’s Mick the doctor takes back to fetch Ian and it’s Mick who gets them both out of the hospital and on the train back to London.  Ian sits between them, slumped against Joe’s shoulder either asleep or unconscious; Joe isn’t doing much better himself, though he still hasn’t let go of Ian.

It’s Mick, too, who drops Joe and Ian both onto the bed in his West London flat, collapses fully-dressed onto the couch for a few hours’ kip, then wakes up in time to ring someone to stay over that evening while The Clash are playing.  It’s not until early afternoon that he shakes Joe awake, tells him, “We’ve got a show, Joe, you can’t miss it.”

Joe rolls over and just stares at him.

Mick tips his head in the direction of the door; he’s got Joe’s leather jacket in one hand and two mugs of coffee in the other.

“You’re mad,” says Joe.  “I’m not going anywhere.”

“You are, though,” Mick says.  “Two thousand people, Joe, you can’t skive off this one.  Look, I got a mate coming ’round, he knows Ian, he’ll be all right, yeah?  I’ll get someone to run you back after the show.”

There’s nothing Joe can say to that; no way to explain that he’s been lying awake for longer than Mick knows, watching Ian closely so that he can keep assuring himself that he’s calm, that he’s breathing, that the last twenty-four hours never happened.  There’s no way to say any of it, so he scrambles off the edge of Mick’s bed, takes his jacket and both cups of coffee, and doesn’t look back until he’s standing at the bus stop and Mick’s handing the keys to his flat over to Simon Topping, so at least it’s someone he knows, someone who’s known Ian for years, someone he trusts –

He doesn’t trust anyone.  Ian’s bandmates have known him longer than Simon has, longer than Joe has, and they somehow didn’t see it coming.  He didn’t see it coming and he should have, he fucking should have, so how the hell does Mick expect him to just get on a bus and play the Lyceum without another word?

He gets on the bus.  Mick pays fare for both of them and buys himself a new coffee when they get there.  Joe sets up in silence, tunes in silence, gives Topper a hand with the drum kit in silence, and when Bernie starts to say something to him about working the crowd, Mick shakes his head at him and says, “Joe’s letting me run the show today.”  (It earns them both an anxious look from Bernie – “two thousand people, Joe!” – but Mick and Joe haven’t failed him yet, so he manages to hold back whatever comment he might have been about to make.)

They’re a smashing success, of course, as always.  Bernie’s over the moon; Joe doesn’t care.

 

Ian’s barely awake for the trip to Joe’s flat.  It’s only in the early hours of the morning that he really begins picking up on what’s going on around him again, realizes that Joe is curled around him on the broken-down mattress (a bed, he needs a bed, can’t keep Ian sleeping on this) and that he has no idea where the last twenty-four hours have gone.  Joe finds this out because Ian sits bolt upright, nearly giving him a heart attack, then grabs hold of him with both hands.

“What – ” he begins, but gets no further before Joe pulls him in, desperate but careful, more careful than he’s ever been, and rests his forehead against Ian’s just to feel the pulse humming in him and remind himself that Ian is still real, still here.

“You had a fit,” Joe says simply, because how the hell else does he break that news?  “Been in the fucking hospital all night.”

Ian freezes, muscles locked save for the constant tic under his eye, and for a second Joe thinks he’s going to do it again.  Instead, though, he just whispers, “At the gig?”

“After.”

“Were the guys there?”

“Yeah, don’t you remember anything?  It was in the car, on the highway, they were bloody terrified, Ian.”  He doesn’t add that he was worse than any of them.

“Shit,” moans Ian into Joe’s ragged sheet, “shit.”

Something hits Joe then, and the weight of it makes him go cold for a minute, takes away his breath so that he can’t speak.  His grip tightens on Ian, and when he thinks he can force words again, he says, “How long has this been happening, then?”

Ian doesn’t answer.

“You knew,” says Joe, dead quiet.  “You knew and you didn’t fucking tell anyone, how long, Ian, how many times, how long?”

Suddenly, all the nights he’s rung up from hotels all over England and Ian hasn’t answered take on new meaning; suddenly, all the times he’s dragged Ian home exhausted and shaky and only half-conscious pile onto him at once.  It’s not weeks Ian’s been hiding this, it isn’t months, it’s fucking years.

“I,” manages Ian with great effort, and then, “just,” and then nothing; he’s got no answer for Joe, no explanation, just the raw silence that hangs in the air around them until Joe says, “Jesus Christ, Ian,” and sits up braced against his arms so that he can reach him to kiss him, again and again, hardly daring to touch him but needing to be close enough to convince himself that Ian isn’t going to flicker out of existence, isn’t going to vanish or go into a seizure or fall off the edge of the world.

“Stop being so fucking gentle,” hisses Ian, and the tic is still there at the edge of his eye and it’s too much for him, it’s all too much.  His throat is wrecked with the effort of not caring; his arms are shaking with the effort of holding them both up; and he just gives up, collapses back onto the mattress and his voice, when he manages it, is choked and gravelly like he’s gone through a pack a day for the last twenty years.

“Ian,” he says, “Ian,” and he can’t get any further than that, but he’s got a grip on Ian like they’re drowning and Ian’s gripping back, “I’m not fucking broken, Joe, I’m not going to fall apart,” and there’s no way to be sure anymore, but it’s as much of a promise as either of them can give, and so it has to be enough.

 

He plays two more nights at the Lyceum.  Ian stays in London and they welcome the New Year by watching the changing glow of the city night through the dingy window of Joe’s flat, pretending they can see the fireworks over the Thames.

 

The next four months are constant whiplash.  The Clash are sent to America, where they are apparently a hit now, though a few months ago they were ‘evil’ and ‘communist.’  Joe doesn’t understand it much, the popularity; he’s not singing for flash American kids with their cars and their pop music and their style, he’s singing for the boys that hang about street corners in Peckham looking for a hit or a job or an answer.  He’s singing for the disenfranchised youth of England, but it looks like the rich kids in America are listening anyway.

Joy Division are staying close to home, but they’re practically fucking meteoric now.  Magazine covers, television appearances, a new album they’re recording with Factory – they’re at the epicentre of the scene, and the higher they fly, the harder Ian falls.

He hears about it second-hand from Ian’s bandmates, the way the doctors change his medication until he can barely think through it and the way Ian leaves off taking it because he says he needs to write (“it kills me,” he says one day over the phone, his voice a tinny, long-distance scratch, “I take it and everything’s trapped, I’m trapped, just stuck in my own brain with no way out,” and Joe is thousands of miles away and powerless).  The way they tell Ian to stop playing, stop going to shows, stop drinking, stop singing, and it’s the first time Joe has ever heard Ian break down, from across an ocean in the middle of the night, I can’t, I can’t stop, and Joe says, “fuck them, Ian, they can shove it up their arses,” calls the doctors uncomplimentary names, swears down the line and rings off feeling like he’s just sold Ian for thirty silver pieces.

He doesn’t stop.  Not singing, not writing, not losing sleep and spending nights out with his mates, and one night not long after Joe gets back to England, Joy Division play the Hope and Anchor again.  Ian’s nervous, it’s obvious, and they’re not up for a long set, but it’s nothing like it was in December.  The band are fired up, Ian is all over the stage; during a break between songs while Pete and Sumner trade instruments, he leans down and catches Joe by the collar of his jacket and says, “Listen to this.”

And then Ian is standing at the back of the stage, behind his guitarist and his bassist and speakers and wires and microphone stands, mentally counting off each entrance, and then he’s singing, and the first two lines alone tear Joe open and leave him raw and vulnerable to Ian’s every word.

He spends the rest of the set sitting on the floor against the wall behind the front left speaker, trying to breathe again.

 

At his flat that evening, neither of them says anything until Joe has made crap coffee double-strength in two almost-clean mugs and sat down on the mattress with Ian, systematically dismantling a cigarette between his fingers without ever lighting it.

“It’s going on the new album,” Ian says quietly, “but I wanted you to hear it first.”

Joe nods.  He doesn’t quite trust himself to speak; when it comes to words that matter, really matter, he’s a blunt instrument and Ian is scalpel-fine.  Anything he says now will come out wrong.

Even though the coffee’s scalding hot, Ian drinks deeply, waiting for a reaction that doesn’t come.  When Joe stays silent, he says, almost inaudibly, “It’s yours, you know.”

“What’s mine?”

“That – the song, all of it.  All of it.  Remember that.”

Joe whispers his thanks into Ian’s hair, breathes it onto the soft skin of his neck, draws it in shaky lines down his back underneath his shirt, and still can’t manage words.

It’s been hours, just lying there together, when Ian gets up, fishes something out of the pocket of his denim jacket, and hands it to Joe.

“Go on.  Have a look.”

He unfolds the scrap of paper to a photocopied picture, toner flaking off at the creases where Ian’s folded it.  Jagged white lines on a black background, it looks like Ian’s music, the way he sketches it out crooked and trailing off across Joe’s pint bottle labels and takeaway receipts and old scraps of notepaper.

“It’s the cover for the record,” Ian says.

“What is it?” he asks, studying the way the faded creases cut harshly across the fine-drawn lines.

“It’s music,” says Ian.  “From the universe.  It’s the sound of a dying star.”

He looks at the paper again, following the sinister beauty of the outlines, then suddenly can’t take it anymore and shakes his head.  “It’s a load of shite, Ian,” he says.  “Why?  Why death?  What about life?”  He’s not just asking about the artwork.

Ian smiles and takes the paper back.  “Death,” he says, “is ignominious and beautiful.  Like life.  People fear unknown pleasures.”

Joe wants to sit up and scoff at that, wants to say, it’s a load of bollocks, Ian, you’ve gone sack of hammers, you have, wants to break the tension and break the spell and drag Ian back to him with all his might.  Instead, he just whispers, “Don’t.”

Ian stares at the battered photocopy for a long moment, then folds it back up and tosses it over his shoulder to land somewhere on Joe’s carpet amidst empty bottles, burnt-out fag ends and records without their sleeves.

“It’s only a star, Joe,” he says, and Joe can almost tell himself he believes it.

 

That’s how most of their conversations go these days, awake in the dark when they should be asleep, Ian hanging off the edge by his fingertips and Joe doing his best to keep him there.  Sometimes, though, things are almost normal – they go to each other’s gigs, drop in at Louise’s just to assure her they haven’t forgotten her, talk about work and pass on gossip about other bands and mutter gloomily about the state of the administration.  Ian grins and Joe saves it up in his head like lyrics to songs he wants to remember; he kisses Joe under streetlamps and hazy club spotlights and bright hospital fluorescents and every moment of it seems surreal and ephemeral, which just makes Joe cling to them all the harder.

Joy Division’s album comes out and Factory host a party.  All their bands are there to play, along with a few hangers-on like the Buzzcocks and The Clash.  It’s a brilliant night; A Certain Ratio and Crispy Ambulance play Joy Division covers and Ian loves it, even when Alan Hempsall flubs half the words to “Transmission” and sings something about local nightclubs instead.  He’s beautiful when he laughs, and Joe hardly ever sees it these days, so when Alan exits to great jeering, Joe buys him a pint.

Halfway through the night, Ian asks Joe if they can leave.  He’s surprised, he thought Ian was having a good time, but they slip out anyway and Joe ducks back in long enough to shove his unopened bottle into Mick’s hand and say, “here, have one on me.”

Mick tucks the bottle into his pocket, asks, concerned, “Ian all right?”  He’s heard Joe’s half of far too many long-distance phone conversations in far too many hotels not to know what’s going on.

“I think so,” says Joe.  “Just had enough, I reckon,” and as he’s walking back outside, he tries not to think about the worried look on Mick’s face or the fact that he knows it isn’t all for Ian.

Ian’s waiting for him ’round the back, pills in his hand and taking a long draw from the bottle in the other.  Joe snatches the bottle from him without even thinking about what he’s doing – “Are you completely off it?” he demands.  “That’s drugs, that is, you don’t mix them with bloody bitter.”

“’s all right, Joe, won’t hurt.  Got to choke ’em down somehow, haven’t I?”

Joe’s already shaking the remains of the bottle out over the gutter in disgust.  “Are you trying to top yourself?  ’cause I can think of a lot quicker ways.”

“No, ’m all right, Joe, come on.”  He’s still got the pills in his hand, stricken look on his face, and suddenly Joe realizes what he’s just said.

“Take the fucking pills,” he growls, setting the empty bottle aside on a bit of brickwork as they pass.  “Need water?”

Ian just shakes his head and swallows them dry.

He’s fumbling with the keys to his flat when Joe mutters, low, “I’m a right fucking idiot, yeah?”

Ian waits until they’re inside before he answers.

“You care about things, like,” he says.  “It’s all there, everything you write, you want to fix things.  Change things.”  He swallows.  “I’m all in my own head, Joe.  Sometimes it feels like I’ll never be out.”

Joe’s hands are shaking with fears he won’t voice when he reaches for Ian.  “You got to care,” he whispers, Ian’s breath hot and his hands cold against Joe’s back, “Ian, you’ve got to.”

“I do,” Ian whispers back like a promise, both hands gripped so tight in Joe’s jacket that the old leather creaks, “I do.”

 

Those are the good times.  The bad times are when the drum line to one of Joy Division’s songs sends Ian into a trance, he doesn’t stop dancing at the end of a song, Sumner has to stop the set midway through and help him off the stage before he seizes.  The bad times are when Joe finds Ian in the dressing room after a show, shattered to the point of tears because he’s fucked up another gig.  The bad times are when Ian’s in hospital, thin wires patched up all over his head, fine nib tracing out spikes and waves on a roll of paper that look so much like Ian’s music Joe can’t take it, and Ian tells him he’s sorry, he’s so sorry, but he doesn’t seem to hear when Joe tells him there’s nothing to be sorry for.

 

In between recording their third album and releasing it, The Clash’s label reckons they ought to go back to America to promote it.  When Bernie breaks the news, they all immediately assume their most sullen looks and moan at one another, “Again?” “Already?” “Don’t we get any holidays at all?” but as soon as he’s left for the studio office, looking more than a little perturbed by his band’s obvious reluctance, they all burst out laughing, clapping one another on the back and congratulating themselves.

“We’ve made it,” says Tops, “we’ve really made it.  Even though Simonon can’t play worth a damn.”  Paul grabs him and roughs up his hair, which hardly makes a difference as its usual state is more disastrous than anything Paul could possibly do to it, and Topper punches him.  All in all, they’re very pleased.

Just as Bernie walks back into the room, Joe asks casually, “So are we opening every set with ‘I’m So Bored With the U.S.A.’ again?” and thus pulls ahead of Mick in the running tally of who’s given their manager the most work-related coronaries.

He means to tell Ian that night, or maybe in the morning, after they’ve done celebrating, but two or three songs into a rehearsal so scattered and adrenaline-filled they might as well not have bothered, Bernie stops them with a telephone call for Joe from Manchester.

The words set his heart pounding – Ian never rings the studio; something’s wrong – but as soon as he picks up the handset, Ian says, “Joe, Joe, we’re going on tour!”

“Fucking hell, Ian,” Joe replies, and doesn’t say ‘don’t frighten me like that’ because he’s not somebody’s doddering old aunt.  “You’d think you hadn’t been before.”

“Not like this,” says Ian, and he’s right – they’re going as support for the Buzzcocks, twenty-four shows all over Britain, and the money’s enough that they aren’t going to be living anywhere near hand-to-mouth for a while.  That’s rare enough in their line of work that Joe feels like his grin might be permanent, and when he tells Ian that The Clash are off touring at the same time, two months in America and Canada, there’s a round of cheers from the rest of Joy Division in the background.

He goes back to the rehearsal room at ease with himself and his band and the world, and when Mick leans in close around the microphone to ask quietly if everything’s all right, Joe tells him no, it’s not, it’s fucking great.

Out of the money from their tour, right before they leave, Barney Sumner buys Ian a guitar.  Not because Ian wants it – he’s still not keen on playing, would rather just write lyrics and work on vocals – but because they’re rock stars and they’re rich for a few weeks and Ian ought to have one.  He shows it to Joe one night, a Vox Phantom Special he’s chosen himself, and Joe picks at it a little and tries all the push-button effects and then grins, “yeah, but you’re still shit at it, eh?”

“You’re jealous,” says Ian.  “You want one.  You’re bored of that awful old Telecaster, you want my guitar, you’re not having it.”

“Piss off,” says Joe, and spends the rest of the evening muttering ‘awful old Telecaster’ and making derogatory comments about shaped guitars under his breath.

 

The tour is a godsend for The Clash.  Not just in record promotion and ticket sales (and it is; Topper actually starts a betting pool on the shade of purple Bernie goes every day when he sees the numbers), but for the band members as well.  Always close, they’ve been going their separate ways lately – Mick has family to see to in London, Topper’s been having a rough go of it, Paul tends to hang back when his bandmates don’t make the effort to draw him in (he’s got flair when they’re together, but apart, his public persona disappears and he’s quiet and subdued), and Joe’s been off with Ian, dealing with everything.

In America, though, they’re completely inseparable.  Everywhere they go, they go together – even for haircuts or to try to track down London newspapers – and everything they do is all of them or none.  They’ve enough money now for three hotel rooms in every city they play, but eventually, Bernie doesn’t even bother, because they’re always falling asleep in the same one, scattered across the floor in between their instruments and their discarded jackets, or sometimes they don’t even make it into the hotel and he discovers them in the morning, collapsed together on the couch in the back of the tour bus, empty bottles of weak American beer stacked against the wall and smouldering ends of burnt-out cigarettes glowing in the ashtray.  Topper’s head comes to just under Paul’s chin and Mick’s face may have made a permanent imprint on Joe’s ribs and his feet hang off the edge of the couch because he’s too tall for it, really, and Bernie has long since learnt not to ask questions, just to accept.

The only downside is that while they’re both touring, Joe hasn’t got much contact with Ian.  He tries once or twice, ringing surly hotel managers all across Scotland to ask for ‘Ian Curtis, I haven’t got a room number, I don’t know what time he’ll be in, look, just, tell him someone rang for him, all right?’ but gives up after spectacular failures each time, relying instead on brief letters sent ahead to Pete and Sumner to make sure someone rings him if anything happens.  It’s better than nothing, but Joe’s still on edge until one night, Mick calls him in from the corridor where he’s having a quiet smoke to tell him there’s a telephone call for him.

He grabs the phone out of Mick’s hands fast enough that he nearly drops it, manages to figure out which end is up, and answers breathlessly.

“Joe, mate, how’s the tour going?”

He’s been so sure it was going to be Ian, or at least someone from Joy Division, that it takes him a second to place the voice.  “Simon?”

“Guilty, yeah, hi, didn’t know if you’d remember me.”

“’course,” says Joe, and doesn’t add that there’s no way he’s ever going to forget those few days in December, though he and Simon have seen one another several times since then.

“Just played a gig with Joy Division, did you know?”

Joe had no idea.  “Aren’t they touring with the Buzzcocks?” he asks, though he knows perfectly well that they are.

“Yeah, they had a night off.  Listen, mate, about Ian.”

“Christ, Simon, what?”

“He’s having some trouble.  Hooky damn near carried him off the stage last night.”

“Shit,” Joe mutters.  “Is he all right?  Get him off the fucking tour if you need to, Simon, you know how he is, he won’t stop.”

“I know.  You try telling him that, though.  Stopping Ian is like trying to stop God himself, good bloody luck with that one.”

“Simon,” says Joe, and though he means it to be threatening, it just comes out desperate.  “Do something.  Just talk to him, yeah?  Just – ”

He doesn’t know what he can ask Simon to do.  He doesn’t know what he could do himself if he were there.  It’s not as if he’s ever been able to pull Ian back down to earth, make him put away everything that makes him what he is and settle for dull, drab, grey-brown everyday life.  Ian isn’t made for that, he burns too bright, and Joe doesn’t know how to say he’d rather have him flicker like a match flame for the next fifty years than explode across the sky like a Roman candle now.  He doesn’t even know if it’s true.

 

After a while, Mick comes back in, takes the phone out of Joe’s hands and hangs it up.  Then he sits down next to Joe on the floor against the wall, slips an arm around him and says, “I’m sorry.  I thought it would help.”

By the time Joe puts together the pieces and realizes that it’s Mick who’s asked Simon to ring up and keep them up to date, Mick has fallen asleep against his shoulder and Joe’s hoarse whisper, thank you, goes unheard.

 

On the day The Clash get back to London, they’re at the airport loading their bags into the back of a black cab when the scratchy radio announces the latest single by Joy Division.  “Oi, you lot,” Mick shuts them up (Paul is trying to load Topper into the trunk with the suitcases; Joe is leaning against the side of the car, cracking up) and they’re stilled into silence by the staticky music.  It’s not until the cabbie shouts over his shoulder, “Are you payin’ for all this waitin’ time?” that they startle back to attention and finish loading up.

“That,” says Topper, “was a bloody good song,” and they all clap Joe on the back like he’s the one who recorded it.

Ian seems pleased when Joe tells him what they all thought of the new single, but it doesn’t last; he’s quiet and distant and spends the evening tracing out shaky electroencephalogram lines of music in a battered notebook.

Things are better over Christmas, which all of them – The Clash, Ian, Bernie, a couple of Mick’s mates from other bands – spend at Mick’s nan’s.  She spends the entire holiday fussing over them, particularly Topper (who is too thin, doesn’t eat enough, ought to be looked after properly for a few days, and it’s the first time in a while they’ve really looked at Topper, who is thin and too pale; Paul goes quiet and lines of worry form themselves on his face) and Ian (who is too quiet and ought to smile sometimes, he has a lovely smile, and even though Ian is thinner and paler than Topper, visibly ill, she doesn’t seem to notice that).  Ian smiles dutifully for her and Tops eats double helpings at Christmas dinner and Mick combs his hair and gets mercilessly teased by everyone, Bernie and Ian included, and things are better, for a little while.

It lasts until January.  They’re all slated to go on tour again, Joy Division around Europe and The Clash on both sides of the world, but before that, they play a few shows at home to remember where they came from.  Joe hates stadium shows and ambitious tours; to him, that’s selling out, it’s the opposite of what punk rock should be.  He loves touring with his bandmates, though, so he takes comfort in the idea that the fame won’t last, and just goes along with it while it does.  Ian seems excited about Europe, but then there are two nights in a row where he spins out into a seizure in the middle of a gig, coming to hours later in the dressing room in involuntary tears, and on the third night, Joe sits by the phone waiting for news he doesn’t want to hear, but it never rings.

Instead, there’s a knock at the door, and when he answers it, Ian’s outside, already drunk enough to be supporting himself heavily on the door frame and with a half-empty bottle of Pernod in one hand.

“Ah, Christ, Ian,” Joe says and pulls him inside.  “What the fuck d’you think you’re doing?”

Ian mumbles something, takes a long draught from the bottle, then says more clearly, “Not going on tour again, Joe, can’t,” and shoulders him aside to rummage through his kitchen drawers.

“All right, then.”  Joe’s never really wanted him on tour in the first place, not since a year ago, not since things changed.  He’s understood, though, that Ian can’t stop; he feels the same thing, the stage pulls at them both.  But if Ian’s willing to step aside now, Joe will take it.  “Don’t go on tour.  Stay in Salford, hell, come with us.”

“No,” another swallow that nearly finishes off the bottle, a long, slow slump against the countertop that separates him and Joe.  “Can’t, can’t let them down,” and Ian slides down until Joe can’t see him at all over the counter.

“You’re not bloody letting anyone down,” Joe tells him angrily.  “Who’s saying that?  ’s you that matters, not the fucking tour.”

“Can’t…” Ian trails off into a hiss of pain and Joe’s around the counter in seconds and, Christ, he’s got a kitchen knife and there’s blood on his hands, on his arms, on Joe’s floor, how has he managed to bleed so much in just a few seconds, how has he managed to cut this much, shit, shit.

It never crosses Joe’s mind to ring someone, to call for help.  He just drags Ian into the bathroom, still clutching the bottle, and rinses away the blood over the sink so that he can see what Ian’s done.  The cuts aren’t deep; there wasn’t time to do much damage and Ian is in no state to have made an earnest effort, but they’re still bleeding, drawn across his wrists with a dull paring knife blade like Ian was trying to pull the music straight out of his veins.

Joe cleans him up, slathers on iodine like he’s replacing the blood Ian’s lost, wraps him in bandages and takes the bottle from his hand before he drops him onto the mattress, mostly unconscious, and falls to his knees beside him to listen to his breathing, to his heart.

It’s only after Ian’s in dead sleep, alcohol-fuelled and accompanied by heavy breathing Joe can hear without having to watch his chest rise and fall, that he stands up and opens the window onto Kilburn High Street and throws the bottle as hard and as far as he can.  It smashes against the brick wall of the house over the street (a light goes on, someone shouts) and Joe looks at the shards on the pavement in the dim streetlamp glow and fights down a wave of nausea.

Then he picks up the phone, dials with shaking fingers, and manages to choke out, “Mick – Mick – ” before he runs out of strength completely.

Mick is there in fifteen minutes and stays the night, holding Joe together in more ways than one.

 

Joe begs them not to send Ian out on tour.  “He can’t,” he says, “can’t stand it.  Look at him, Rob,” and he and Joy Division’s manager both watch Ian onstage, holding his guitar like he hardly wants to touch it, standing there while his bandmates tune up like a man waiting for a hanging verdict.  “You’re fucked if you think he’s ready to go anywhere.”

But it’s not Rob who’s insisting, it’s Ian.  “No,” he says, again and again, “I’m fine, yeah, let’s carry on,” and Joe doesn’t know what Sumner and Pete and Steve have been saying to him, but Ian is pretty much agreeing to anything right now.  All the fire has gone out of him, all the anger and frenetic energy; now, if someone says, ‘come on, Ian, it’s time for practice,’ or, ‘what if you take guitar on this one, Ian,’ or, ‘we’re done for today, going down the pub, are you coming,’ he just nods and follows.

Two nights before they leave for Amsterdam, Joy Division are playing for enjoyment’s sake at Band on the Wall, one of their old stomping grounds.  Ian’s in no better shape than he has been all along, but he’s refused to sit this one out or take it easy or have a few nights off before they go to Europe, so he’s up there, guitar in hands and half the Factory label crowded around the edge of the stage.  Joe is front left side, like always, hands shoved deep into his jacket pockets with one eye on Ian and the other on Mick, who’s come along.

It almost goes well.  It almost works, Ian’s silent stoicism and Sumner’s attempts at involving the crowd; they almost pull out an entire set, most of it new material, without any issues; Ian almost makes it to the end of the show, but even though the crowd are good and the venue is full of Factory musicians and they’ve turned off the strobe lights and gone with dim house bulbs, something goes wrong and Joe can see when Ian’s face changes, his muscles go rigid, and before even Sumner has noticed what’s happening, Joe is up on the stage trying to hold Ian upright and work the guitar out of his vice grip at the same time.

He means to take over playing, let Ian stagger off to one side and sit with his head between his knees and maybe manage to hang onto the threads of his self-control until after the set, when Joe can take him backstage and helplessly do nothing of any use at all, but he hasn’t even got his fingers settled on the frets before the guitar’s taken away and Mick’s voice is in his ear saying, “go,” and it’s Mick who takes the microphone and hits the next chord and knows the next line, while Joe stumbles into the wings.  And it’s then, sitting on the floor amidst wires and leads and dusty equipment boxes holding Ian while he seizes and watching Mick stand up front on the stage (nothing like the mad way he plays when he’s with The Clash; he’s tall and motionless and deadpan, respectful of Joy Division’s hollow style), that Joe realizes, really understands for the first time, exactly why Mick’s doing all of this.  It’s not because they’re mates and it’s not because Ian needs it and it’s not because musicians in need help each other out.  It’s been years since an underfunded tour of England and a hotel room at midnight and a song Joe never should have written and Mick’s still here, still carrying on, because (I didn’t mean anything by it, Joe) he loves him.  He fucking loves him, and Joe doesn’t deserve it, can’t change things, can’t fix things, not for Mick or for Ian or for him, and here he is with Ian shaking in his arms and Mick miles away onstage and he’s completely fucking useless to them both and he doesn’t deserve any of this.

 

Two days later, Joy Division are in Amsterdam and Joe is down the pub, getting drunker than he’s ever been.

 

It’s difficult to say whether Europe is harder on Ian or on Joe.  It’s a rough tour for the band, problems arising at every destination (no hotel in Germany, no stage in the Netherlands, no audience in Belgium because the street team’s posters are confiscated by the police), and Ian’s illness doesn’t make anything easier.  They cancel a few tour dates, and Simon Topping reports back to The Clash that Ian is pretty shattered by it all; he’s doing his best, playing as much as he can, taking his medication (which makes things worse as often as better), but in his own mind, he’s still failing, still letting down his band.

Joe doesn’t send a message back, because there’s nothing he can say that he hasn’t already said.  He’s talked to Rob and the Factory executives, he’s darkly threatened Pete and Sumner more than once, he’s even gone after some of the crew members he knows from setting up and tearing down for Joy Division so often.  None of it’s worked, though, and so the only thing Joe can think of to do is to wait for the tour to be over and then lay hard into everyone involved with the band until someone bloody well gives them a few weeks off.

When Joy Division get back to Manchester, though, The Clash are on their most successful tour to date and Joe is dealing with a raft of problems.  Topper’s ill (“nervous exhaustion,” is all Joe will tell anyone who asks and Paul’s face goes grim whenever he says it), Mick’s uncomfortable with Joe’s casual attitude toward the music, Paul’s drawn and unhappy and won’t say why, and Joe is intensely bothered by the flashy, rock-star attitude his bandmates and Bernie are pursuing.  He’s angry with all of them and they’re none too pleased with him, either, and they’re all trying to hold together a tour that is soaring to new heights on the one hand and crashing ignominiously to the ground on the other.  So by the time Joe finds five minutes to himself to ring up Factory, Tony Wilson is terribly apologetic, but the band are already recording.

“Are you lot completely mad?!” he demands down the line from Aylesbury.  “They’ve just been on tour, you’ve shoved them straight into the studio, no wonder your bands all fall apart!”  It’s a low blow and unfair; Factory have always been a family to their artists and Joe doubts anyone else would have looked after Ian and Joy Division half as well, but he’s angry and he isn’t entirely in the wrong.  “You ever heard of a rest?”

“It’s only a couple of weeks, Joe,” Tony tries to placate him.  “We’re not dragging them on for months taping, it’s just a few songs, that’s all.”

He doesn’t answer when Joe growls down the line, “Yeah, and how’s Ian taking it?” which is foreboding, but Joe’s fears aren’t confirmed until he rings Simon, who has the inside story, and who tells him that Ian is having a hellish time, blacking out during recording and vanishing for hours at a time and yet insisting constantly that they not stop.

“It’s like he has to get it out,” Simon says, “like it’s now or never.  Pete found him passed out in the toilets the other day, hit his head on the way down, and he just got up and said ‘let’s keep going.’”

Joe doesn’t answer, because the words ‘now or never’ have found a cold place in him that robs him of speech, but Simon continues.  “They’ve only got a couple of weeks, I think he’s really stressed about it.  It doesn’t help that they’re always taking the piss during sessions.”

“Simon,” says Joe, “you going into the studio tomorrow?”

“Well, I wasn’t planning on it…”

In the end, Joe manages to convince Simon to have a talk with the band.  He doesn’t explain why it’s so important; only he and Mick and Ian know about a drunken January night and a kitchen knife and hopelessness so pervasive even Joe can’t step in to protect Ian from it, and none of that is Joe’s secret to pass on.  Instead, he flounders mid-sentence and relies on the fact that Simon is neither blind nor stupid and can see perfectly well for himself how much Ian needs his bandmates to shape up for the sake of his health, or maybe more.

A few days later, Simon rings back to say they’ve wrapped up recording and are going to have a week off before playing London with the Stranglers.  Joe and The Clash are off to America again, so all he can say is, “Don’t let him get hurt, Simon,” and if Simon didn’t know something was up between Joe and Ian before, he sure as hell knows it now.

 

The Clash are in New York while Joy Division play London.  They’re recording at the Electric Lady Studios, something they’ve been excited about for ages, and Mick’s all over the place going, “we should do a rockers beat!” and “we should record offside, look, here, like this!”  It’s Joe who says calmly, reaching out to shut off Mick’s boom box, “We should do a rap.”

Mick damn near freezes on the spot, vibrating with energy.  “We should do a rap!” he agrees.  “C’mon then, we need something really funky, give me a beat, Tops.”

Behind the drum kit Topper grins and starts up, Paul close behind, and Joe gets in close to Mick and starts rapping at him, making up the words off the top of his head, sometimes good, sometimes totally nonsensical until Mick smacks him upside the head and tells him that they’ve only got a few days in the city and if he wants to record a load of bollocks, he’ll do it on his own time.  After that, it’s just a couple of hours before they have the whole thing in the can, and then they’ve got the rest of the day to themselves.  Topper disappears almost immediately; Paul, frowning, heads for the hotel where Joe knows he’s going to spend the rest of the afternoon sitting in the room he shares with Topper, waiting; he and Mick, armed with stacks of paper and pencil stubs, find a local bar and settle in for the day with a few pints.

When they get back to their room around eleven, Mick guiding Joe carefully through the door so that he doesn’t bash into the frame (he has perhaps had a few more pints than originally planned), the telephone is ringing.  It’s four o’clock in the morning London time, far too late for anyone from home to be in touch, so Mick gives Joe a bit of a shove so that he collapses onto one of the beds, then answers.  “Hello?”

A moment later, he goes dead white and hangs up the phone without another word.

“Joe,” he says, and Joe sobers up like a shot when he says, low-voiced, “Joe, it’s Ian.”

 

They cancel their next two shows without question.  Joe is on a flight by morning, in London by late afternoon, and at the hospital in Manchester by evening, and when he gets there, they shrug helplessly and say, he isn’t here.  He’s gone, checked out two hours ago by Martin Hannett, and they have no word on why or where they might have gone, and Joe gives completely over to panic.  He rings everyone – Simon (who doesn’t answer), the Factory offices (which are closed), Tony Wilson’s home number (and stands there for nearly five minutes listening to the ring echo dead into the air as nobody picks up) and, finally, gets hold of Vini Reilly from the Durutti Column, who says he’s just off out the door to the Bury gig, that’s where everyone is tonight, doesn’t Joe know?

“I’ve been in America,” Joe whispers down the line, hating himself.

Vini’s decent enough to pick him up at the hospital, and Joe spends the entire half-hour drive in a blind rage, slamming his hands into the dashboard and ranting at Martin and Tony and anyone else he can think of – what the bloody buggering fuck are they thinking, Ian’s done a fucking overdose, he ought to be in hospital, he ought to be at home, he ought to be anywhere but where Factory can get their fucking fingers on him (and Vini, who’s signed to Factory too, kindly doesn’t answer that).

 

At the Derby Hall, some other band Joe doesn’t know are playing when he leaps out of Vini’s car (still moving, but he doesn’t care, and anyway Vini’s a shit Sunday driver who barely breaks the speed limits) and shoves his way past the doorman to get backstage to Ian.

He’s sitting in the dressing room, staring into space, practically his entire label clustered solicitously around him.  Steve’s patting him awkwardly on the shoulder, Pete is periodically muttering, “all right, mate?” and Sumner’s standing behind him like he’s waiting to take somebody on.  Both Alans are there, and Simon, and Tony and Martin, and that’s about when Joe hauls back and takes a full-on swing and knocks Martin onto the spit-shiny linoleum floor.

“What the fuck are you on about?” Sumner yells, grabbing Joe’s arms and pulling them back as if he thinks he could really hold Joe if it came down to it.

“It’s all right, Barney,” Martin says, wiping his mouth and sitting up.  “Don’t worry about it.”

“What,” says Joe, deadly quiet, “the fuck do you think you’re doing?”

Ian hasn’t said anything, hasn’t even appeared to notice Joe’s arrival, but now he looks up and just says, “I’m playing, Joe.”

“What?  No, you’re bloody not – ” but Joe catches himself as soon as he’s said it, swallows it down along with the rest, because it’s not Ian he’s angry at and it’s not Ian’s fault and he’s not even sure Ian really knows what he’s doing here.  “Ian,” he says instead, forcing himself to be gentle, “you don’t have to play.  There are ten or twenty other bands here who can go on instead.”

Ian shakes his head slowly.  “’m all right,” he mumbles, as if he knows already that Joe isn’t buying it.  “I’m going to play.”

“Ian…” but Joe isn’t there to lay down the law and Ian’s face is crumbling into pain and he’s doing this all wrong, he’s making things worse instead of better, and he doesn’t care who’s watching or what they think of him after this, he pulls Ian into his arms and says into his hair, “all right, it’s all right,” and then, to the Factory artists stunned into silence, “What the fuck are you looking at?”

Joy Division go on a few minutes later without Ian, who still has his face buried in Joe’s shirt and his hands over his neck as if he’s trying to shield himself from a blow.

It’s two or three songs before Ian looks up and says, “I’m all right, Joe, I’ve got to go on,” and stands.  He’s shaky and the strain is already coming out in his voice, but he’s hanging onto his guitar for all he’s worth and Joe knows that look on his face by now, so he just nods.

“Right,” he says.  “I’ll be here, then.”

When Ian goes on, Alan Hempsall, who’s been filling in for him, comes off and stands in the wings with Joe.  “Right fuckin’ mess, this,” he says.  “Ian ought to be in hospital, not on a bloody stage.”

Joe just nods, without taking his eyes off the band.

Ian manages two songs and they’re bloody good, even though Joe can pick out the tremble in his voice on the low notes and the breathlessness in the quiet spaces.  It tears at something in him to listen to that and know why it is, know that twenty-four hours ago Ian wanted never to do this again, wanted it enough that he sat down and tried to make it happen, and –

“You all right, Strummer?”

He shakes himself back to the world, nods at Alan.  “Just… had a long flight.”  If Alan doesn’t know what’s going on, beyond the fact that Ian has been ill, then Joe isn’t going to be the one to tell him.

At the end of his second song, Ian’s voice breaks and he barely finishes it before dropping to his knees in front of the microphone.  Sumner, thank God, puts aside his guitar and takes Ian’s arm to help him offstage; he’s got the brains to deposit him straight into Joe’s waiting hands, and so they sit by the side of the stage in the wings, Joe’s arms around Ian and his knees digging into the hardwood floor, watching Simon Topping go on to do a Velvet Underground cover with the rest of Joy Division.

It’s then that Joe reckons they’ve made it through, they’re going to be all right, he’s going to take Ian home and ring the hospital and tell Mick he won’t be back for a couple of weeks; it’s then that he thinks they still have the chance to finish the gig and sort all this out; it’s then that he starts planning exactly how he’s going to tear Martin Hannett apart after they’ve packed up the gear.  And it’s then that some fucking idiot flings a beer tankard at Simon onstage and everything, everything falls into chaos.  Suddenly there are people throwing bottles and punches, someone’s got a wire knife in one hand, someone else has broken a pint over one of the roadies’ heads and is having the shit beaten out of him by another roadie.  Half of Section 25 drag Pete offstage and into the dressing room; Tony Wilson hides under a table, shouting though no one can possibly hear him; Joe grabs Ian, shielding his head, and half-helps, half-carries him back to the dressing room where Pete is staring, wide-eyed, at the crashing and shouting coming from the doorway.

 

It’s well over an hour before the noise stops and the police line the walls of the Derby Hall while everyone who’s already given statements helps to clear up.  Only then does Joe loosen his grip on Ian, let him get his head up, and get a look at his face for the first time.  When he does, he’s terrified.

He’s never seen Ian like this before, chalk-white and shaking, eyes bloodshot and unfocused.  His face is wet, Joe’s shirt is soaked through, and his breath is catching in his throat like he’s trying to talk or sob or anything at all, but nothing is coming.  “I – ” he manages finally, “I – ” and chokes on the word, fingers clutched desperately in Joe’s shirtsleeves.

Joe takes a jacket off the nearest chair without caring whose it is, wraps Ian in it, and marches him out past policemen and penitents, past Factory musicians and label executives, past piles of broken glass and discarded bottles and some poor sod sitting propped against the wall with a dishtowel to his head to stem the flow of blood from a cut over his eye.  The only person who dares to try to speak is Tony Wilson, and the look Joe shoots him is poisonous enough to kill the words unspoken.

 

Ian goes back to hospital.  Joe goes back to America.

 

Four days later, Joy Division are playing again and The Clash are drawing the United States leg of their tour to a close.  Ian is staying with Barney Sumner for the duration, under what essentially amounts to twenty-four-hour supervision; it’s the only reason Joe agreed to leave in the first place, and even so, Simon is checking in with him and with Mick every day.  Rob, the band’s manager, has apparently appointed himself Ian’s personal liaison, defender and godsend, and on Joy Division’s first appearance after Bury, Simon reports that he got up onstage after their set and declared that they wouldn’t be coming back on that night and anyone who felt like throwing a bottle was asking for hell.

Naturally, Simon also reports that bottles flew from every direction and the band played an encore, but he says Ian seemed to be all right with it, so Joe doesn’t bother booking a flight back from Los Angeles to beat the shit out of an audience nine hundred strong.

The Clash are playing sold-out shows every night, despite tensions in the band and the complete division of Joe’s attention.  They’re even enjoying themselves most of the time – they’re going to Europe next, they haven’t been in three years and last time it was almost as good as America was the first time around – although Topper takes off on his own more and more often, while Paul declines invitations to mess about with Mick and Joe and instead sits in the doorway to his and Tops’ hotel room and sketches endlessly on newspapers and itineraries and hotel stationery.

They finish with America and begin travelling around northern Europe (Joe buys every weird food he can find and Mick refuses to try any of it; Paul gets a ridiculous woollen sweater and forces it over Topper’s head one cold night on the tour bus, and Topper protests violently, but looks secretly pleased once he’s thoroughly lost the battle), then down to Germany to play a few dates.  Paul’s always been fascinated by German history, and Joe knows that Pete and Sumner are as well, so they buy cameras in Berlin and take photographs all over, so that Paul can use them to design backdrops and Joe can use them as a kind of peace offering with Joy Division when they’re back in England.

It’s in Germany on a night off after a show that Joe gets a telephone call, and Ian’s on the other end of the line.  He hasn’t heard from Ian directly since after Bury; he couldn’t ring from hospital, and then he’s been bounced about from Sumner’s house to Rob’s to Tony Wilson’s to Simon Topping’s and back again, doing shows and shooting a video for Joy Division’s next release, and on top of all of it, the band are getting packed up for their first American tour.

Today, though, Ian’s on top of the world – so much so that Joe’s almost worried, remembering medication-induced mood swings and Ian’s characteristic swing between extremes even before he started taking the drugs.  Still, he can’t help but be swept up by Ian’s infectious laughter – “We’re going to America, Joe!  Pity it wasn’t a few weeks earlier, we could have met up,” and Joe bites his lip and mumbles something about meeting up when they’re both back in England.  Ian hesitates for a moment, but then agrees.  “Still, it isn’t the same thing, is it?”

They talk for most of the night, mainly because Joe is having trouble with the idea of putting down the phone and giving up the happiest he’s heard Ian in months.  Ian doesn’t seem to mind, though (“I’m not fussed, I was only going out with Sumner tomorrow”), so Joe doesn’t ring off and Ian doesn’t stop talking about anything he can think of – America, filming, water-skiing over to Blackpool with his mates – and it’s the best night Joe’s had in a long time.

Maybe, he thinks when the sun’s up over the horizon and he finally puts down the handset (“will you be around tomorrow?” Ian asks, and Joe can promise him that much), maybe what’s been missing is a trip to America, a change of pace, a break from downtrodden Manchester clubs and crushing routines and the tiny, sordid flat Ian calls home.  Maybe that’s what he needs, and maybe, now that he’s having it, things are going to be all right.

 

Ian rings again the next day and Joe’s dead tired, but he’d still rather talk than sleep, so he rolls over in bed and drags the phone over to himself without getting up.

“How was water-skiing?” he asks, but Ian says he didn’t go.  Instead, they end up talking about the American tour again, Joe making recommendations and dispensing advice and recounting mad stories until Ian abruptly asks, “When are you back to England?”

“Start of June,” Joe tells him, “same as you.  You’ll come over mine when you get back, eh?”

Ian promises, so quietly Joe can hardly hear it, though that might be the line.

Joe’s saying something inane about Germany and the fact that all his bandmates are acting like complete lunatics while they’re here when Ian takes a deep breath and says, “Joe.”

He’s stilled instantly.  “Yeah?”

“I should – I can’t stay on the line.”

Right, of course.  It’s late and Joe’s not the only one of them who’s been running on empty lately.  “’s all right,” he says.  “Look, ring me before you go, yeah?”

“Yeah,” Ian agrees, “all right,” and then, “Joe.”  This time it’s not as strong as the last, not as certain.  “Thanks.”

Joe doesn’t know why Ian’s thanking him.  He hasn’t done anything he hasn’t wanted to do; he hasn’t been anything except what Ian needed, and not even that, really.  He’s going to, though; he’s going to take a few weeks off when they get back, stay in Manchester for a while, help Ian get back on his feet.  He’s going to do what he ought to have been doing for months now instead of taking the stage under the bright lights of a new city every night to be a rock star.

“You got no reason to thank me,” he tells Ian.

Ian’s voice is far away when he says, “Yeah, I do,” and Joe is thrown back to New Year’s Eve two years ago, Warsaw’s final show, standing in front of Mick Jones and saying the same thing.

He thinks of Mick, then, four years of standing by Joe and never saying a word, never saying the words that mattered, and he says, “Ian, I – ”

He doesn’t finish.  It just sounds so bloody stupid in his head.  Mick would say it, but he can’t, and Joe can’t either.

“I’ll see you in a couple of weeks, yeah?” he says instead, lamely.

“I’ll see you,” Ian echoes, and then rings off.

Joe rolls over, buries his face in the pillow, and doesn’t move again until morning.

 

The phone doesn’t ring again for two days, not until the night before their next show, and when Joe picks up, he says, “Not cutting it a bit fine, then, are you?” because he knows Ian’s playing day after tomorrow in New York.

Then he freezes, not moving, not speaking, as the voice on the other end of the line (too low, too clipped, too even) carves a great chunk out of his insides and leaves him empty and hollow on the bed.  It doesn’t stop when Joe’s got nothing left in him, just goes on saying words that have long since stopped having meaning, until he remembers how to move and drops the handset onto the cradle.

As he’s walking out of the room, Mick calls after him, “Joe?” and “what’s up?” and “is Ian all right?” but Joe doesn’t stop to answer, doesn’t even seem to hear at all.

Paul and Topper find him in the morning, curled on the back seat of one of the vans just like on the first tour they ever did together.  Unlike then, though, Joe isn’t asleep; he’s just huddled around his guitar, slowly picking out the melodic line to a Joy Division song, staring into space.

They make Mick come and fetch him.  Mick doesn’t ask why, just helps Joe out of the van, takes his guitar to hand off to the stage crew, and makes him drink cup after cup of coffee made thick and strong and horrible, exactly the way Joe likes it.  He asks again if something’s wrong, if Ian is okay, if Joe needs anything, but still gets no response.  He even tries ringing Simon Topping, but no one picks up there, either.  Finally, he gives up trying to get Joe to talk and just drags him through getting ready for the show.

“I’ll do the crowd tonight,” he says, patting Joe awkwardly on the shoulder as they’re waiting to go on, “but you got to talk to me afterward, all right?”

Joe doesn’t answer, and there’s no time for Mick to say anything else before they’re being shoved onto the stage by one of the roadies.  That ought to be the end of it; Joe ought to let everything inside him tear its way out through the microphone, through his guitar, into the anonymity of bright lights and dark night and a thousand unknown faces he’ll never see again.

But then someone in the audience has a go at someone else and a fight starts – messy, but not unusual – but all Joe can see are bottles hailing down on a stage in Bury and the look in Ian’s eyes when the rioting stopped, and before he half knows what he’s doing, he’s leapt blindly off the stage with his guitar in hand and lashed out with it, and the dull crunch of impact doesn’t help, the words he’s screaming don’t help, nothing he’s ever done has helped, and when the police come to take him away, he’s on his knees in the middle of the floor, face buried in his hands, unresisting.

 

Mick comes for him in the morning.  Joe’s expecting him to be furious, worse than the last time, worse than ever, but Mick just sits down on the bench beside him in the holding cell and says, “I heard.”

And somehow, that’s what breaks him.  Until now, it’s been just him; there could have been a mistake or a miracle; they could have been wrong, but if Mick knows, then they’re not wrong and it’s true.

When he collapses in on himself, Mick is there to catch him and hold him, hands cool against Joe’s back and whispered words soothing in his hair; Mick is there, and they stay like that for hours because Joe hasn’t got anything else anymore, nothing to go back to, no one to look for in the audience at shows or take home exhausted in the middle of the night or wake up next to in the morning, too warm inside his leather jacket with clever fingers tracing music up and down his ribs.

Mick is there to walk him out of the police station into the midday sun.  He’s there to cram Joe’s things into a suitcase and hand them off to someone else to put onto the bus.  He’s there in the back of a cramped tour van that evening with Joe and two bass guitars and a stack of amplifier boxes that topple onto his shoulders every few minutes, because Joe couldn’t face the thought of the tour bus, rowdy and convivial, or worse, not.

He’s there, too, in the middle of the night when he thinks Joe is long since asleep, when he strokes back Joe’s hair with the side of one hand and kisses his forehead and whispers with overwhelming sadness, “I’m sorry, Joe, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” and Joe clings desperately to him in the dark and doesn’t answer.

 

In Sweden, there’s a parcel waiting for Mick at the front desk of the hotel.  He retrieves it with a nod, carries it upstairs to the room, and then sits on one of the beds with it, turning it over and over in his hands.

Finally, he says, “Ian left this for you.”

A shock runs through Joe’s body at the sound of the name; no one’s said it aloud since the telephone call, and he used to have to bite down on a grin whenever he heard Ian’s name, but now he has to choke on slivers of ice.

“I can keep it for you,” says Mick carefully, “until you want it.”

Joe, numb, shakes his head, and as soon as he’s taken the paper-wrapped parcel with fumbling fingers, Mick gets up to leave.

“Stay,” he whispers; his voice comes out hoarse with disuse, but Mick sits back down on the bed.  There are a lot of other things Joe wants to say (don’t leave, that’s all I ever had is him and you, don’t go), but he doesn’t give wrecked voice to any of it, and Mick stays while Joe picks and picks at the Sellotape covering the brown paper parcel in his hands.

There’s a sheet of paper inside, folded, and for a moment Joe feels sick to his stomach.  He doesn’t want a letter, doesn’t want reasons or excuses or apologies, doesn’t want to hear anything from Ian’s shaky blue pen that he couldn’t say face-to-face or over the phone or anything, anything but this.

It isn’t a letter, though.  It’s the lyrics to the song Ian wrote for him, the one he sang for the first time at the Hope and Anchor, and Joe hears him say, all of it, remember that, and blinks the blurred words back into focus under his eyes.

Ian’s underlined three lines in it; Joe reads them even though he has them off by heart, folds the paper back up and puts it into his inside jacket pocket, and stands up to leave.  He needs some air.

“All right?” Mick asks softly.

Joe nods.

It’s a while before Mick speaks again, and when he does, he says, “He loved you,” as if he knows they never talked about it.

Joe nods again, slowly.

“I’m not as much of a blind idiot as I used to be,” he says.

Mick stands up from the bed, reaches Joe in two long strides, and wraps him up in his arms until Joe can hardly breathe.  It helps.

“I know that,” he says, “and Ian knew it, too.”