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*
Freddie has a knack for finding good chairs. Even in grottier pubs, if there’s somewhere to sit that isn’t sticky, cracked, vaguely insanitary—he’s the man to track it down.
My homing instinct for luxe, calme et volupté, he thinks: doesn’t that serve to console? Doesn’t something? (Although why does he require consolation? Can’t he just sit in the pub and have a drink with Roger, with Brian, with John if he ever bloody well turns up—)
He is a terribly wicked and decadent man.
That’s only half a secret.
“D’you want another, Fred?”
He does. He hasn’t any money to buy a round later, to reciprocate Roger’s eternal generosity—but after all, it’s Roger, not a stranger. If he can cadge from anyone, without it being damnable—
Brian is explaining something else to do with the Lunar Roving Vehicle and its data collection, which Freddie definitely ought to understand by now, it’s not a new topic. He isn’t bored, just stupid. Brian deserves a listener with more than a handful of brain cells, not this moron crouched in an armchair, nodding, pretending to get it.
“—with the laser altimeter,” Brian says happily, smiling at Freddie, and so Freddie smiles right back.
“What about the Galileo thingummy—” Roger is beginning, his voice loud as he sets down the drinks—he likes it too, he understands it all—but then John fetches up, hanging over the back of a wooden chair with a newspaper in his hand.
“You’ll never guess what my mum gave me,” he says, “It’s not even from here—her friend Joanie sent it, in an envelope. The whole thing!”
Clearly, though, the expense and grandness of sending the whole thing comes second to the thrill of the page to which it has been folded open: QUEEN, the headline certainly says, though it isn’t set in specially large type.
It’s not as if getting into the provincial papers is unheard of, Freddie tells himself, holding the glass to his lips and sipping—sipping—swallowing carefully. No hurry. Even Sour Milk Sea... John is waving it over Brian in excitement, and it’s impossible not to see how very young he is—
“He thought you rocked, Brian—“
“Ha!” The exclamation of triumph is from Roger, rather than the recipient of this plaudit, but no one could doubt its authenticity. Roger’s mouth is beer-wet, and he’s grinning, his cheeks flushed pink.
“—and look, it mentions Smile, I think he must be interested in music, not just a hack...”
“What about Freddie?” Brian says. “What does it—”
“Oh,” John says, the pleasure going out of his voice. “Well, I don’t think he—gets—Freddie...”
Brian takes the paper silently, scanning the article fast—then folds it up, as if he is dismissing it for good.
“Buy you a drink?” he says to John, tone carefully ordinary.
“Let me see it,” Freddie says. The words rattle out fast—without stammering, thank God, so he sounds like a man rather than a boy. “Brian—give it to me—”
“Fred,” John says, and he sounds so adolescent, so half-frightened, that Freddie thinks, how bad can it fucking be. But the moment is also painfully similar to being in a room with Jeremy and Chris: the hurt feelings and the anguish and everyone’s ghastly embarrassment. Better to get it over with, not to go round and round and round.
So he snatches it out of Brian’s hand.
The paper unfolds easily to the place it was open at, and his mind guesses—without volition—that John’s mum’s friend sent it like this. Folded to show the review. And why should she not? He sees, at once, the sentence praising John, and Brian—
Roger is mentioned more for his looks and past successes than how, exactly, he played the drums at the show the reviewer went to. It isn’t what one longs to read, perhaps, but it’s not bad. And then—let down only by the frontman, he sees. The words feel loud, though he’s reading in silence. So does the bit about his face. His voice. His Julian-and-Sandy manners.
He flinches, and hates himself for it. Of course he knows they won’t get only good reviews—he isn’t naive, not like that. But it’s no use, to know.
He drops the paper on the scarred wooden table. At least his glass isn’t anywhere near empty, thanks be to Roger—and he drinks from it, swallowing hard. The evil old urge to cry is there, of course, but he’s got very good at not surrendering to it in public, now he’s grown up. The others will just think he’s angry.
“What a bastard,” Roger is saying sympathetically—which is the exact opposite of helpful, but Freddie can hardly complain about something so well-meant.
Brian goes to the bar, and Freddie crosses his legs, leaning back in his armchair.
It’s the best chair in the pub. Doesn’t that count for something?
*