“Hiya, Melissa,” I shouted. “Wha’d ya know, love?”
“Where are your shoes? Don’t tell me you’ve been running around London in the dead of winter in nothing but socks. What are you doing to her, Nick?” Melissa stepped back to let us in.
I handed her my soaking-wet sneakers. “What do you know, love?” I insisted at the top of my lungs.
“Hush. Get in here.” Melissa grabbed my arm and pulled me inside. “Jesus Christ, you’re half-drowned.”
Nick sighed. “I tried to stop her.”
“Melissa, I fell in the Thames,” I said proudly.
“Not so much fell in as went for a bloody swim,” Nick muttered.
“Are you mad? Why didn’t you stop her? Don’t you know it’s bloody snowing outside?”
“I’d like to ’ave seen you bloody stop ’er.”
“She’s ice cold! And she’s pissed. Come on, you. Get upstairs. Don’t you know you could get hypothermia? I’m fucking serious.”
“What’d ya know, love?” I said, as she led me to the upstairs bathroom.
“Yes,” Melissa said, “yes. You’ve learnt a new expression, and you sound bloody English. Come on, get out of those wet things.” She ran steaming hot water into the tub. “Get in and stay in till I get back. And don’t drown,” she admonished me.
“You’re always sticking me in the bloody bathtub,” I said grumpily.
“Hmm. How about that?” Melissa left the bathroom. The water was soothing, but I couldn’t get it hot enough.
The Isle of Whitby was in Wapping, down an old cobblestone street and right on the bank of the Thames. Nick had been knocking back pints, and I vaguely remembered trying to keep up with her. We’d climbed down the back stairs so I could see the Thames up close. A few flakes of snow fell, and I felt a complete sense of oneness with my environment, like I was omnipotent—experiencing life at a revved-up rate, achieving absolute clarity. As I breathed in the sharp coldness of the air, I remembered thinking that I’d never actually touched the water of the Thames before. It seemed like the Ganges, something holy to bathe myself in.
Melissa knocked on the bathroom door. “May I come in?” She placed a cup of tea on the soap and shampoo holder.
“Ta, Melissa.”
“Listen you, don’t you realize—?”
“Where’s Nick?”
“She’s crawled into a nice, warm, sensible bed and gone to sleep. That’s where she is. Listen, you can’t go swimming in the Thames.”
“Nick gave me her socks so I’d have dry ones,” I announced.
“That was sweet of her.” Melissa sat down on the closed toilet lid. I could see the soft curve of her breasts beneath her open dressing gown and the black T-shirt that said “I Wish It Could Be ’77” and had a picture of two punks walking away with back patches on their jackets and bum-flaps attached to their belts. The band name “Special Duties” was written in blocky, different-sized punk letters. Melissa continued, “Look, I could be bloody pissed off at you.”
“But you’re not, are you? If you are, why are you smiling?”
“I’m not smiling. I’m grimacing.” Melissa did her best to look disapproving.
“Is that a real word? Grimacing. What’s a grimace? Isn’t that one of those words you say out loud then wonder if it really means anything? Say it again. It’s garble-nonsense.”
“Will you stop, please? Being adorable is not going to work.” Melissa knelt and rested her arms on the rim of the tub. Then she reached in her hand and splashed water at me. “Crikey, are you boiling yourself?” The way she left her hand hanging over the edge of the bath like that, so gracefully, the light shining off the silver ring on her finger, caused a sharp jolt of pain to run through me. I tried not to let it show in my eyes.
“The people in the pub were ever so nice. They didn’t even mind me getting the floor all wet. And they were ever so good with advice, like telling me to wrap up warm and go home immediately.”
“The people in the pub thought you were mad. And so do I. Now stay in there and drink your tea. I’ll bring you something dry to wear.”
I’m adorable, I thought, the words having taken this long to reach my sozzled brain.
Melissa left a pair of sweats, heavy socks, and a flannel shirt on the lid of the toilet for me. I felt happy in her clothes but still chilled. Melissa put me in her bed with a hot-water bottle at my feet, and I managed a minor tremble. “For fuck’s sake, Amanda.” Melissa held me against her for a minute to warm me up. “And another thing.” She tucked me in again. “You can’t match pints with Nick. Is that what happened?”
“I think so. I remember it being my shout, and my pints were stacking up.”
“Why didn’t you just buy her one and not yourself then?”
I thought about it. “That didn’t make sense at the time.” I didn’t tell Melissa the truth, that the medications I took for my brain glitches accelerated the power of alcohol. I knew I was going to pay dearly for my drinking later. On the rare occasions I drank, I never had more than one pint. I mostly stuck with orange juice, Coke, and maybe some shandy.
Melissa made me take two paracetamol tablets and drink a large glass of water. “Go to sleep, kid. I’ll be up later. No more pubs by the river for you.”
I heard her laughing as she went downstairs. By this time, I was keeping a stash of medication hidden inside the Takamine’s guitar case in Jake’s room and wobbled down the hall to take my nightly dose with the last swallow of water. No amount of alcohol short of passing out would make me forget to do that. On my way back, I stumbled in the hallway and went down with a thud.
Melissa came upstairs and found me sitting there. She shook her head. “You’re shedded.”
“What?”
“It’s an expression. ‘My shed has collapsed taking most of the fence with it.’”
That struck me as hysterical. “My fence has collapsed!” I shrieked, rolling over on my side and resting my head on her foot. Looking down at me, Melissa pursed her lips in a way that only made her mouth seem sexier.
“Your day is over,” Melissa said, grabbing my arm. “Get back to bed. And you’re lucky I’m not still an A and E doc. Do you have any idea how many people come in injured on a Saturday night because they’re pissed out of their brains and have fallen over? There’s even a term for it. You’re PFO, darlin’. Pissed Fell Over.”
“What would you do?” I asked playfully.
“Give you fluids and a very stern lecture.” Melissa pulled me up.
I lay in bed and crooned the first verse of “Sort It Out” by the Swedish band the Caesars in a loud, sloppy voice when Melissa went back downstairs. “‘I wanna smoke crack cause you’re never coming back. / I wanna shoot speed balls, bang my head against the wall. / I wanna sniff glue cause I can’t get over you. / Am I gonna sort it out?’” I repeated it until I sang myself hoarse and then to sleep.
TRACK 23 Ever Fallen in Love (With Someone You Shouldn’t’ve)?
I noticed now that I was stricken with anxiety whenever I wasn’t with Melissa. It was a startling and unpleasant new development. The anxiety came from not knowing if I was doing enough, if I was doing all I could, to make her love me. Let Melissa love me was in my head all the time and made it hard to concentrate. I couldn’t get used to the idea that there was nothing I could do to change the way she felt. Sometimes I thought my anxiety would kill me, though I wasn’t certain exactly how it would accomplish this.
With Melissa’s encouragement, I used her flat as a recording studio. I downloaded royalty-free drum loops off the Internet and modified them on the sampler. Nick and I went to charity shops and outdoor markets, digging up obscure CDs I thought might contain interesting, usable beats. One of my favorites was a selection of Cuban rhythms. I didn’t think anyone in Afghanistan would care if I nicked four seconds of it. I decided it would
be perfect for my punk-reggae song “Holiday in Afghanistan.” I lifted out a few seconds of the beat I wanted to use and recorded it onto the sampler. Then I looped it so there were no seams. I recorded this basic beat as a track on the digital recorder.
Track by track, I started adding instruments. I got out the drum machine and played along to my basic beat in real time on the touch-sensitive pads. Each pad was a different part of a drum kit, and I had thirty drum kits to choose from. I spent a few hours writing and recording a bass line with Jake’s custom Fender bass that had both Precision-bass and Jazz-bass pickups.
We went to a music shop and bought a tiny, secondhand electronic keyboard for five quid. It was meant to be a child’s toy, and the keys lit up pink when I played them. But it had the capacity for making different sounds like organ, jazz piano, and brass. I connected it to the digital eight-track using its headphone jack, and the recorder was so superb it sounded like real keyboards. It only had two octaves, but that was sufficient.
Late one afternoon when Nick was off with some mates, Melissa came upstairs to find me. She took off her scarf and shook out her hair, which shone in the overhead light. “I’m absolutely shagged out. Fancy taking a night off and watching a video with me?” Suddenly her tone changed. “What is it?” She looked at my horrified expression.
“You’ve been absolutely fucked?”
“What? No, tired. Shagged out is tired. Not shag as in fucking.” She’d been on-call for after-hours care the night before, had been called out twice, and hadn’t got much sleep.
“Oh. I thought you meant you’d been out with Martin.”
“I’m not shagging Martin,” Melissa laughed. “But if I do, you’ll be the first person I tell.”
I looked up at her, at the way her gray, cable-knit sweater hung on her body, accentuating her broad shoulders, and wanted to say, don’t do it. He’s not good enough for you. But how could I know that? I’d never even met the bloke.
I went out and got vegetable biryani, curry, and a few of my favorite horror films. I felt like a good scare and told Melissa she’d benefit from one, too. “Take your mind off frightening reality,” I said. One of the videos I’d rented was an old one, The Amityville Horror, because Melissa had never seen it. James Brolin and his new wife Margot Kidder buy a possessed house in Amityville, New York. He gradually turns into one of the people who’d lived in the house previously, a man who’d murdered his entire family. Every night, he wakes up at precisely 3:15 a.m. because that’s when the bloke he’s turning into killed everyone with a shotgun.
We turned off the lights in the back sitting room and huddled together on the couch. Even though I’d seen The Amityville Horror before, it still frightened me. The demonically possessed house locked the babysitter in the closet. Melissa grabbed my arm, and I screamed. “I thought you’d seen this,” she whispered.
“What’s your point?” I said.
James Brolin discovered a direct passageway to hell in his basement. Melissa was almost sitting in my lap. “God,” she yelled at the hapless family on the telly, “the walls are fucking bleeding! What’s your first clue you should get out of the fucking house?”
After it ended, we were both terrified. “Wasn’t that fun?” I asked.
“Fun,” Melissa agreed. We went upstairs, and I got my hat and gloves off Jake’s bed. “Where the bloody hell do you think you’re going?” Melissa asked.
“Home,” I said with false bravado.
“Are you mad? You’re not seriously going out in the dark by yourself?”
I didn’t like the thought any more than she did.
“You scare me to death then think you’re leaving?” Melissa said. “You’re staying the night or I’ll never sleep. You can leave anytime after daylight.”
I shrugged gratefully and turned to head downstairs to the spare bedroom. There was a telly in there I could watch if I couldn’t fall asleep.
Melissa shook her head. “Uh uh. You’re sleeping in here with me and we’re locking the door.”
As she got ready for bed, I sneaked my medication out of Jake’s room and went into the loo. As I swallowed my pills with water from the tap, Melissa rapped lightly on the door. “Come in, Melissa.”
“Here.” She opened a cabinet and handed me a fresh toothbrush. She was wearing a clean Pretenders tour T-shirt with a picture of Chrissie Hynde and her blue Telecaster on the front.
“Oh, ta,” I said. When I was done using it, I put it proudly next to hers.
In the bedroom, Melissa handed me another tour item, a gray sweatshirt that said “Pretenders” on it in pink letters, and I beamed happily at her. I carefully climbed into bed next to her, and Melissa turned out the light.
“Oh, no.” I sat up suddenly. “What time is it?”
“Stop that,” Melissa said. “It isn’t anywhere near 3:15 a.m. yet.”
“I was just asking. Oh, no!” I grabbed Melissa, and we both screamed.
“What is it?” She turned on the light.
“Is that James Brolin climbing up the stairs?”
“Stop it.” Melissa shoved me. She turned off the light again.
“I thought you’d want to know,” I said.
“Well, I don’t. Tell Mr. Brolin to make sure the door shuts completely on his way out,” Melissa murmured sleepily.
“Melissa?” I shook her.
“What?” she moaned.
“Satan wants to know if he can have a cup of tea.”
“Yes,” Melissa said. “Yes. Satan can have a cup of tea and even a biscuit. Alright?”
“Melissa?”
She sighed. “What?”
“Satan wants to know can he cook something in your kitchen?”
“Just so long as it isn’t an animal. This is a cruelty-free zone.”
“No sacrificial babies or virgins?”
“I should think not. Now go to sleep. And tell Satan to do the washing up or I’m sealing off the passageway to hell in the spare bedroom forever.”
“Melissa,” I said, after we’d been lying quietly a while, “do you think you’ll sleep with Martin?”
“What?” Her tone told me that now she was awake. “I don’t know. Why?”
“No reason. Just—you don’t have to.”
“What makes you think I don’t know that?” She sounded annoyed.
“I don’t know.” I knew I’d said the wrong thing. “I suppose I meant he shouldn’t pressure you if you don’t want to.”
“What makes you think he’s pressuring me? What’s this sudden interest in my sex life or lack of one?”
“Do you like him a lot?”
“If I didn’t like him, I wouldn’t go out with him.”
“Do you practice safe sex?”
“Amanda. What’s got into you?”
“Nothing. I hope he appreciates you, that’s all,” I said sullenly.
“Are you trying to tell me something?” Melissa shifted around, and in the dark I saw her staring at me.
“I’m trying not to tell you something.”
“What does that mean?”
“Nothing. It doesn’t mean anything.”
“Do you know something about Martin that I don’t? Have you even met him? Look, Amanda, I’ll have him fill out a questionnaire before I even think about sleeping with him. Happy now?”
“Overjoyed. It’s a big decision.”
“No, love, it isn’t. It either happens or it doesn’t. I’m sorry to disappoint you.”
“Don’t say that. You never disappoint me.”
“If you’re afraid I’ll fall in love with him and disappear or something, I won’t. Is that what’s bothering you? I don’t do that to my mates. Now will you please shut up and go to sleep?”
I lay there castigating myself for coming too close to saying too much.
TRACK 24 Chinese Takeaway
“This is bollocks.” Melissa hung up the phone after unsuccessfully trying to locate Nick for the third straight day. “I’m a little worried. What’s happened? I thought you were keeping an eye on her.”
“I can’t exactly put her in handcuffs,” I mumbled.
“Well . . .” Melissa gave me a devastatingly sexy half-smile and pain shot through my body. I instinctively put my hands to my heart. I knew she hadn’t meant to upset me.
“I’ll pop round her flat and see if I can find her,” I offered, sinking my hands into my pockets where they couldn’t get me in trouble and quickly turning toward the door.
“I’ll drive you.”
“Tube’ll be faster.” I started singing “London Traffic” from the second Jam LP This Is the Modern World. I grabbed Melissa’s black Tom Robinson Band sweatshirt hanging in the entranceway and pulled it over my head. It had a bright yellow fist on it like the cover of his Power in the Darkness album.
“Invite her over for a meal. I’ll get some Chinese. And for God’s sake, sing if you’re glad to be gay,” Melissa called after me because the chorus of Tom Robinson’s most famous song “Glad to Be Gay” begins, “Sing if you’re glad to be gay / Sing if you’re happy that way.” Released as a single in 1978, it had been our anthem at Exeter in 1980. And I still had the original yellow-and-red “Glad to be Gay” badge that a woman had given me at Gay Pride in Huddersfield.
It was dark by the time I reached Nick’s flat. “Dyke” was spray-painted in red by the door. I wondered if it was just a coincidence—“dyke” for some reason being considered a universal insult—since Nick wasn’t the most openly lesbian person in the world. I leaned on the buzzer. I stepped back and shouted up to her window. I hung around for a few more minutes then took the tube back to Hampstead.
I told Melissa about the “DYKE” graffiti. “You don’t suppose someone left it there as a compliment?” I asked. “A sort of, well done, so you’re a dyke, welcome to the neighborhood type of thing?”
Pissing in a River Page 13