by Louise Voss
Samantha had promised to drum up a gang of mates who so far hadn’t materialised, and there’d been no sign of Pete before we left to set up, so I assumed he chickened out and wasn’t coming. I told myself I didn’t care, that it didn’t matter because I had Samantha there, standing right near the front with a pint glass clutched in her long, slim fingers, beaming at me, her auburn hair loose, cascading over her shoulders, and her eyes rarely leaving mine. Even just looking at her turned me on. And in that respect I was glad that Pete was a no-show, because it meant I’d be sharing my mattress with Samantha tonight instead of him.
During our third number, the door opened wider, light spilled in from the saloon bar and a group of eight Goths – five women and three guys – burst in, shuffle-dancing as soon as they were through the door, immediately bringing the room to a dark sort of life. One of them, a short slim woman in combats with a mass of black curls, was far more animated than the others. She leaped on Samantha and hugged her around the neck effusively, her lit roll-up – or was it a joint? – dangling from her fingers.
Back off, bitch, I thought, turning up my snarl and raising my voice to a banshee howl as we launched into a cover of The Cure’s ‘Subway Song’, which only made the black-haired woman jump around to the beat more wildly. I wondered who she was. She and Samantha were obviously old friends, but Samantha hadn’t mentioned anyone specific coming, just ‘some of my buddies from when I lived in Wandsworth’.
She had all sorts of buddies in different places – buddies I knew nothing about. I wasn’t even really clear who she’d been living with in Salisbury when I first met her – she never mentioned them anymore and was irritatingly vague whenever I asked her. Something about someone’s sister-in-law, I recalled.
After five songs we stopped for a beer and fag break. I was hyped and jittery, and it was strange to be outside in the June dusk of the pub’s garden, my ears ringing in the summery silence, the birds’ evensong replacing our angry anticapitalist paeans. Matty brought me a pint of lager, and its fizz was soothing on my scratchy throat.
‘It’s going wicked!’ he enthused. ‘Samantha’s mates are loving it, they just told me. They love our songs! That guy with the white dreads, he says his brother-in-law’s in the music business, and if we make a demo he’ll give it to him.’
I laughed. ‘Matty, are you mental? There’s no way we’d get a record deal singing this sort of stuff! We’re hardly New Romantic, are we? We live in a squat!’
Matty snorted dismissively. ‘New Romantics? That crap’s so nineteen eighty-one. And there’s tons of bands out there doing what we’re doing. Look at Siouxsie and the Banshees. The Cure. There’s this new band, The Cult, everyone’s raving about. And we’re better than all of them. Definitely more fucking authentic. I bet Robert Smith never went on a protest march in his life, and he’s probably never even set foot in a squat.’
Samantha appeared in the garden then, looking flushed and high. ‘Honey, this is awesome! I’m dead proud of you.’ She slid her arms round my waist and hugged me, and I blushed with pride. She did look proud. Usually she had a kind of almost maternally fond expression on her face when we were getting off with each other, but this was different. There was actual respect in her eyes.
‘Where’s your brother? I thought he was coming? I’m dying to meet him.’
‘So did I,’ I said, rolling my eyes. ‘He’s being a flake. I think he’s pissed at me for leaving him on his own with our m-mum.’ I stuttered slightly over the word ‘mum’, having been about to say ‘mom’ then realising that was a step too far, linguistically, on top of the words ‘flake’ and ‘pissed’. Neither of which, in that context, I’d ever used before I met Samantha. It was the first time I noticed how much I parroted her.
The boys joined us too, and we drank pints of snakebite, courtesy of the management and in lieu of actual payment, while Samantha went around the whole pub garden exhorting the punters to ‘come check them out, they’re awesome’. I watched her gesticulate towards us, pushing her wavy hair impatiently back from her freckled face, and at that moment felt completely content with my odd life and the unexpected direction it had taken the second I met her. She was wearing a 1940s nipped-waist navy-blue dress with white polka dots and the ubiquitous DMs, and she looked amazing, particularly in contrast with all the sartorial Goth gloom surrounding her.
Her gang of friends who’d bundled in during the first set was still in the function room, leaning against the walls, smoking and chatting when we returned for the second round. I noticed her black-haired pal eyeing me up in a not entirely friendly way as I climbed back up onto the little stage and adjusted my mike on the stand. Halfway through the first song I turned my back on the audience – swelled now to around twenty – windmilling my arms and stomping my DMs in time with the drums in the instrumental break. When I turned back, Samantha and the black-haired girl had left the room. I didn’t think anything of it at the time, particularly not when the door opened and a familiar tousled head peered around it. Pete!
I broke into a wide beam that made everyone turn to see who I was looking at, and sang with renewed joy, shrieking out the lyrics of our song ‘Flare’, about what the world would look like after the next huge set of solar flares: ‘Scorched earth, no TV, no need for microwaves, all your food already fried…’
Pete beamed back at me from the doorway, spreading his hands wide and shyly inclining his head as I moved my hips, pointing at him with both forefingers. He edged inside, slid the straps of his rucksack – the same one Samantha had rescued from Greenham for me – and leaned against the wall, sipping at a half. A half! What a wuss, I thought affectionately, suddenly beyond happy that he was there to witness this fantastic evening.
Fuelled by alcohol and spliff, our small audience’s inhibitions gradually dispersed like the threads of blue smoke caught in the lights, and one by one they all began to dance. I’d never imagined what a buzz it would be to write and sing songs that people were dancing to! Fantastic, I thought from the stage, raising my pint glass high in triumph.
After our last song, plus a repeat of one from the first half as an encore, I jumped off the stage and leaped into Pete’s arms, as the DJ put on some James Brown to indicate that we were done. Pete blushed crimson to the tips of his ears, but he whirled me around self-consciously and allowed me to ruffle his hair and bestow smacking kisses repeatedly on his cheeks.
‘My bro!’ I called to the watching audience, who were taking breathers from the dancing to crowd around me and the other band members. ‘My twin, believe it or not! All the way from Salisbury. Come on, Pete, let’s get to the bar. Leave your rucksack at the back of the stage, it’ll be fine.’
Pete did as he was told, nodding at Webbo, who was beginning to dismantle his borrowed drum kit. I took drinks orders from the guys and, linking arms with Pete, headed towards the bar. ‘I can’t wait for you to meet Samantha,’ I enthused. ‘You’ll love her, she’s just so cool.’
How was Pete going to react when he learned I’d become a lesbian? As far as I knew, he was still a virgin. There was something very square about him as a teenager.
As I handed him a pint – ignoring his protests – I regarded him with fondness, his tufty hair, ruddy cheeks and farm-boy jeans. You could tell a mile off he wasn’t from London.
‘Let’s go shopping tomorrow,’ I said. ‘I’ll take you to Flip and we should get you some decent gear. They do awesome checked shirts and stuff; vintage, you know?’
‘Awesome checked shirts?’ he mimicked. ‘Why have you gone all American? Watching too much Cagney and Lacey are you?’
‘Samantha’s from Kansas. I spend a lot of time with her. It’s obviously rubbed off on me. Where is she, anyway?’
I looked around the bar, and then out in the garden, but there was no sign of her. While Pete went off to the loo I asked the barman if he’d seen her. ‘Pretty girl with long curly red hair. Blue-and-white spotty dress, American?’
‘Oh her,’ he said,
his hand inside a tea towel rotating in a tankard. He was a mean-looking skinhead. ‘Yeah, hard to miss her. She took off about twenty minutes ago – said something had come up. You Meredith? She told me to tell you she’d see you back at the squat later, and well done.’ He said the last two words with a sneer, as if it pained him to pass on the message.
‘Oh. Thanks,’ I said, hauling myself up onto a bar stool and picking at a beer mat, until he reached forwards and removed it from my fidgeting fingers. Pete came back and joined me at the bar.
‘Samantha’s pissed off somewhere,’ I said. ‘You’ll meet her back at the sq— er … house, though.’
Thankfully, someone had put a very loud Deep Purple track on the jukebox, so Pete didn’t seem to have heard my near slip. I was worried if I told him in advance, he wouldn’t come and stay.
‘So your mate Samantha is your flatmate too?’
‘Sort of,’ I agreed, suddenly not able to meet his eyes. ‘It’s us, and the boys in the band. They look after us. Not that we can’t look after ourselves,’ I added.
Matty and Marsh struggled through the doors from the function room, carrying a big speaker each from the PA. ‘Oi, just because you’re the singer don’t mean you don’t have to help us load out!’ Marsh called, his skinny legs bowing with the weight.
‘Coming,’ I said, taking a long swig of my drink.
33
1984
Meredith
I felt pretty annoyed with Samantha for bailing on me before the gig was even over, but I tried to swallow it down. After all, she had hitched all the way back from Greenham specially to support me; she’d mustered up a gang of friends to come and watch – without whom we’d have had almost no audience at all; she’d danced and looked proud and given me loads of thumbs-ups. I reminded myself that she was a free spirit. She never liked being in one place for long. She’d left a message for me with the barman. I’d see her back at the squat…
But where had she been for the past three hours? There was a worm of unease squiggling around in the pit of my belly when I realised that her friend, the girl with black curly hair, was also nowhere to be seen. The rest of their mates were still in the pub garden, smoking and laughing, but she definitely wasn’t with them.
I was so keen for Samantha to meet Pete; I’d talked incessantly about him to her, and she claimed to be fascinated that I was a twin. Keen – but simultaneously nervous about admitting the truth of our relationship. Pete did have a ‘live and let live’ policy – he wasn’t a prude – but he was quite old-fashioned, and innocent. And perhaps he might not be quite so tolerant when the ‘deviance’ – as my mother would call it – was so close to home.
For the first time ever, I felt a tiny bit glad that my dad wasn’t around anymore. I realised my lip was curling, even just thinking about his reaction. He’d have been completely appalled that I was gay.
It helped with the pain of his loss. Small mercies, and all that shit.
We got all the equipment loaded into the van that Matty had borrowed from his work, and declared the evening a success, celebrating our first live gig with a couple more pints of snakebite and black. Pete was almost as drunk as me, I realised, loosening up as the night went on, losing his country-bumpkin shyness and joining in the banter with the boys at the bar. By the time the skinhead barman called last orders, we’d all had so much snakebite that none of us seemed to be in possession of knees anymore, sagging and staggering and bellowing our songs as we pushed our way out of the pub and wobbled towards the squat. Matty was too drunk to drive, so he said he would pick up the van in the morning.
Samantha wasn’t home when we got in, but my first main concern was monitoring Pete’s reaction to my new abode. He didn’t baulk at the rubbish-tip front garden, with the sofa lying on its back like an old drunk, all its rusty springs on display, or at the boarded-up downstairs windows, but he did a double-take as we got inside and Matty switched on the hurricane lamp in the hallway, which illuminated the damp, peeling walls and bare floorboards.
‘Are you redecorating?’ he asked dubiously as I steered him towards the stairs, pointing out the broken treads and the missing banisters. He stepped gingerly up them as Webbo guffawed behind us.
‘Yeah, darling, this place will look divine by the time the interior designers have finished next week! New carpets are arriving tomorrow, and the chandeliers are being flown in from Paris, and—’
‘Oh shut up, Webbo!’ I said, seeing Pete’s shoulder blades jam hard together as he stiffened his back in embarrassment, chin jutting forwards; a well-worn gesture. I half expected him to click his heels together and salute at the same time whenever he did it. It harked back to his time in his early teens in the Salisbury Sea Cadets (I never understood why Salisbury had Sea Cadets being, as it was, firmly inland). Pete had hated every minute of it, so the back-stiffening was, I thought, some kind of Pavlovian reaction; parade equalling mortification.
‘Why’s there no electricity then?’ he asked.
‘You never been in a squat before, mate?’ Marsh enquired cheerfully.
Pete stopped in the upstairs hallway, so suddenly that I bumped into the back of him. He turned and stared at me. ‘What, you mean you don’t pay rent? You’re living here illegally? Oh my god, Mez! What’s the matter with you? Mum’ll have a conniption fit!’
I rolled my eyes and dragged him into my bedroom, which was illuminated by the sodium orange glow of the street lamp outside the window. ‘Sit,’ I commanded, pointing to the bare mattress. ‘Mum doesn’t need to know it’s a squat. It’s fine. Stop being such an old woman about it.’
Pete flopped back on my mattress, spreading his arms wide, as I lit the two oil lamps on the floor. ‘She’s already going nuts about you moving out and bailing on your A levels, you know.’
Guilt bolted through me, an emotional pile-driver boring down through the beery haze as I set the match to the second wick quickly, before it burned my fingers. ‘I might still do them and go to uni. It’s no big deal!’
Pete wasn’t satisfied. ‘What if you get evicted? Then what?’
I shrugged. ‘I’ll come home, I suppose. Or I’ll go somewhere else, with Samantha.’
‘The famous Samantha. When am I going to meet her?’
At that exact moment, I heard the front door close, and soft footsteps on the stairs, pauses where the feet stepped over the broken ones. I knew the sound of her tread, like I knew the sound of the beat of her heart and the number of freckles on her nose. ‘Now, by the sound of it.’
I couldn’t help glancing at my watch. Almost midnight. She’d been AWOL for more than three hours.
Samantha burst into the room, a crumpled cigarette tucked behind her ear and her hair a wild mess at the back of her head, as if she’d been asleep for hours. Or, as Dad used to say, ‘dragged through a hedge backwards’.
‘Honey! Well done you,’ she drawled, rushing over to me and hugging me in the effusive way she always did, the way that ensued no other hug would ever compare.
‘Was it OK?’ I asked, ever anxious for her approval. The hug may have been big, but the words sounded patronising to my insecure ears.
She kissed me full on the lips. ‘It was fine, for a first gig.’
This was not the high praise I’d hoped for, and my face must have fallen.
‘Mez, that’s bollocks. It was brilliant!’ Pete sat up and glared at Samantha, the flickering flame of the oil lamps casting weird shadows across his face.
He obviously wasn’t going to take it well, then. Part of me was impressed that he’d worked it out so quickly. We hadn’t snogged in front of him, so how did he know Samantha wasn’t just a friend? While intuitive in many practical ways, when it came to emotions and love, he could be remarkably slow on the uptake.
‘You must be Pete! I’ve heard so much about you. I’m Samantha. Delighted to meet you.’ She stuck out her hand and subjected him to her highest-watt, most cornfed smile.
To my dismay and horror, Pete comp
letely dissed her. He stared at her for a moment, as if she was some sort of alien, got up from the mattress and acting as if she wasn’t even there, turned to me. ‘Where’s the loo? I’m dying for a slash. If you even have a bog in this dump – or do you just piss out of a window?’
He stomped out of the room before I’d had time to answer, and for a moment Samantha and I just stared at each other.
‘Wow,’ she said contemptuously. ‘You didn’t tell me he was a homophobic prick.’
‘He’s not!’ I replied hotly. ‘He must have just … worked it out, and it’s a shock for him because I’m his sister. He’ll come round.’
Samantha pouted and put a hand on her hip. ‘What, so I have to suck up to him till he forgives me for turning his precious twin into a nasty dyke like me? He can go screw himself!’
I’d never heard her talk like that before. She was occasionally terse when she had PMT, but this was a new and very unwelcome tone.
‘Samantha, what’s the matter?’ I asked. ‘Where have you been all evening, babe? We missed you after our set.’
Samantha plucked the cigarette from behind her ear, stuck it between her lips, squatted down on her haunches and picked up the matchbox from the floor. Her spotty dress had some kind of net underskirt that bunched out around her. I wondered where she’d got it from – I’d never seen them before; neither the dress nor the petticoat. Not for the first time, I realised how little I knew about her. How did she have the cash for new clothes?
I waited, but she didn’t speak, just sucked on her cigarette.
‘Nice dress, by the way. That new?’
Still no answer. Then, ‘What’s it to you?’
I was flabbergasted. ‘Pardon?’
‘Pardon?’ she mimicked, and I felt tears of confusion spring into my eyes. It had been the best night of my life, and now she and Pete were ruining it.