by Kevin Brooks
Just as he hit the floorboards, we finished the song, and for a moment or two there was a stunned and menacing silence. Then Chief stepped out from the crowd, gave the thumbs-up to Curtis, and started helping Jake to his feet. At the same time, another biker appeared and began dragging his still-unconscious friend away, and Curtis chose that moment to step up to the mike and stare out at the crowd, his face a mess of blood and sweat-streaked mascara.
‘That was “Stupid”,’ he said, grinning momentarily at the bikers. ‘And this …’ he continued, looking back at the crowd, ‘… this is “Inside You”.’
I started playing first, thumping out the big heavy bass line to the song, and then Stan brought the rest of the band in with four razor-sharp beats on the snare drum. Although it was a really good song – dark and menacing, with a disjointedly hypnotic rhythm – I’d never been too keen on the lyrics.
I WANT YOUR HEART
I WANT YOUR BLOOD
I WANT YOUR SKIN
I WANT YOUR FLESH …
When I told Curtis once that I didn’t like the words, he’d actually got quite indignant with me.
‘Why?’ he’d said. ‘What’s the matter with them?’
‘Well, you know … they’re just a bit …’
‘A bit what?’
‘Nasty.’
‘Nasty?’ he sneered. ‘What do you mean, nasty?’
‘Come on, Curtis,’ I sighed. ‘You know what I mean … it’s like you’re talking about a girl as if she’s just a piece of meat or something.’ I shook my head. ‘It makes you sound like a serial killer.’
He laughed.
I glared at him. ‘It’s not funny.’
His laughter stopped quite abruptly, which was kind of disconcerting, and he stared at me. ‘You just don’t get it, do you?’
‘Get what?’
‘Look,’ he sighed. ‘Just because I write the words and I sing them, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re coming from me. I mean, Jesus Christ, Lili … you can write from other people’s points of view, you know.’
‘Yeah, but –’
‘And, besides, the song isn’t about physically wanting someone anyway. It’s about wanting someone so much, loving someone so much, that you actually want to be them.’ He looked hard at me. ‘Do you understand? You don’t just want to be with them, or be part of their life. You want to be inside them.’
Although, at the time, his explanation had seemed perfectly reasonable, I was still far from convinced, and every time we played ‘Inside You’ I still felt slightly uncomfortable. And that night, as we finished the first verse of the song, and Curtis started singing the chorus –
I WANNA BE
I WANNA BE
I WANNA BE
INSIDE YOU
– I suddenly realized that he was staring intently at someone at the front of the crowd as he sang, and when I followed his gaze to see who he was looking at, I saw the sickeningly pretty figure of Charlie Brown. She wasn’t dancing or anything, she was just standing there, all on her own, as cool as you like, her smouldering black eyes fixed on Curtis as he sang to her. And that’s what he was doing, without a doubt – he was singing to her.
I WANNA BE
INSIDE YOU …
It didn’t last very long, this intimate little serenade, and by the end of the song Charlie Brown had turned round and coolly slinked off, glancing coquettishly over her shoulder at Curtis as she went. I did my best to be mature about the whole thing, trying to convince myself that it didn’t really mean anything, that it was all just part of the show … that Curtis was, after all, the front man in a rock ’n’ roll band, so he was supposed to do this kind of thing … I mean, I couldn’t expect him to behave like my boyfriend when we were on stage, could I?
The trouble was, no matter how hard I tried to be mature about it, I simply couldn’t do it. I wasn’t mature. I was sixteen years old. Curtis was my first proper boyfriend. He was the first boy I’d ever slept with … we were lovers, for God’s sake. I wasn’t entirely sure what that meant, if anything, in terms of our commitment to each other, or our future together, but that wasn’t the point. The point was, he was my boyfriend, and seeing him singing to that girl, singing those words to her, right in front of me …
It tore me up.
And for the next couple of songs, I found it really hard to concentrate. I didn’t make any major mistakes, but I did hit a couple of bum notes, and I very nearly messed up the ending of one song. I don’t think anyone in the audience noticed, but Curtis definitely did, and when he came over to me before the start of the next song – tuning his guitar on the way – I was fully expecting him to have a go at me, or at least just point out my mistakes, and I was building myself up to say something back to him, something cutting and harsh, or maybe I’d just totally blank him, or give him a withering look … but none of that happened. Instead, he just came up to me with a heart-melting smile, briefly took hold of my hand, and then leaned in so close that I could feel the warmth of his lips as he whispered in my ear, ‘I love you.’ And before I had a chance to say anything back, he kissed my neck, let go of my hand, and loped back to the front of the stage to introduce the next song.
I knew that they were just words, of course – I love you – and I knew that they shouldn’t make any difference to how I felt, that they shouldn’t make up for anything, that they shouldn’t make me feel any better … and I knew how pathetic it was that they did make me feel better. I knew that it was shallow and stupid of me, and I knew that I ought to be ashamed of myself. And I was.
But that didn’t change anything.
I still felt really good.
Deluded or not …
I felt wanted again.
And that was enough for me.
‘This next song’s for Lili,’ I heard Curtis announce. ‘It’s called “The Only Thing”.’
We played ten songs that night, and when we finally left the stage, the audience carried on clapping and cheering and stamping their feet for a good five minutes or so. It was a wonderful feeling – sitting in the dressing room, sweaty and drained, exhausted and ecstatic, listening to the crowd crying out for more – and I think we were all very tempted to go back out and play another song or two, but Jake was adamant that we shouldn’t.
‘Always leave them wanting more,’ he said, lighting up a joint. ‘If they want to hear you again, they’ll come and see you again.’
So we all just stayed where we were for a while, talking and drinking, laughing about this and that, teasing Jake about his ‘fight’ with the biker and his already blackening eye … and gradually everything began to calm down a little. The owner of the bar came in and congratulated us on the gig, then Jake went off with him to sort out ‘some business’, which I assumed meant getting our payment for the gig, and maybe negotiating terms for a residency.
Curtis came over to me then, gave me a big sweaty hug, and asked me if I was all right.
‘Yeah,’ I told him. ‘I’m fine.’
‘God, that was good, wasn’t it?’
‘Yeah …’
‘I mean, that was it, wasn’t it? That was fucking it.’
I guessed he’d taken some more speed at some point, because his eyes were darting all over the place and he kept licking his lips all the time. The cut on his head where the bottle had hit him had opened up again, and a thin trickle of blood was oozing down his face.
‘Listen, Curtis,’ I started to say. ‘Maybe you should –’
‘Do you want a beer or something?’ he said, glancing over his shoulder at the open dressing-room door. ‘I’m just going to try and find Malcolm before he goes, see what he thought of us.’ He looked back at me. ‘All right?’
No, I thought to myself, suddenly consumed by jealousy again, it’s not all right. Because you’re probably not going
to see if you can find Malcolm, are you? You’re probably going to see if you can find Charlie Brown …
Curtis smiled at me. ‘I’ll bring you a beer when I come back, OK?’
‘Yeah …’
He kissed me – a quick peck on the forehead – and left.
I sat there for a moment or two, just looking down at the floor, feeling kind of sorry for myself … and then I remembered that I wasn’t alone. I raised my eyes and glanced over at Kenny and Stan. They were sitting quietly in the corner together – Stan with a bottle of beer in his hand, Kenny wiping the sweat from his guitar strings with a cloth.
Stan smiled at me. ‘All right?’
I nodded.
Kenny stopped cleaning his guitar and looked over at me. He didn’t say anything for a second or two, he just sat there gazing quietly at me. And when he looked back down at his guitar and started wiping the strings again, I thought that was it.
But I was wrong.
‘He doesn’t mean it,’ he said softly, without looking up.
‘Sorry?’
‘Curtis … when he does stuff that hurts you … he doesn’t mean it. He’s just being …’
‘Just being what?’ I asked.
Kenny shrugged. ‘He’s just being Curtis.’
7
My mother’s maiden name was Mari Ellen James, and she was born and brought up in a small farming village just outside Bangor in north Wales. Her mother was an alcoholic, her father a man who revelled in violence. My mother left school at fifteen, became pregnant at sixteen, and lost the baby a week before she was due to get married. The marriage was inevitably postponed, and while my mother was recovering from the miscarriage, her prospective husband – a farmer’s son from a neighbouring village – slipped out of his parents’ house one night, walked to Holyhead, and caught the first ferry to Dublin.
My mother never saw him again.
A year or so later, while working as a waitress in a tea room in Bangor, she was approached by a customer – a smartly dressed man with an English accent – who claimed to own a modelling agency in London. He asked my mother how old she was, gave her a business card, and told her that if she was interested in becoming a model she should get one of her parents to give him a call at the end of the week when he’d be back in his office in London.
My mother, of course, didn’t dare say a word to her parents about this smartly dressed man from London. Instead, on the following Friday morning, she left home for work at the usual time, caught her usual bus into Bangor, but rather than getting off at her usual stop near the tea rooms, she stayed on the bus all the way to the railway station where she bought herself a ticket to London.
By two o’clock that afternoon, she was standing outside a shabby-looking office building in Regent Street, gazing up at a row of hand-written company names listed on the wall by the door.
‘World Class Models’ was the second name from the top.
She reached up and pressed the buzzer.
‘I know it all sounds rather seedy,’ I remember my mother telling me. ‘And there were lots of times when it was … but modelling is a seedy business, Lili. It always has been, and it always will be. And, of course, I was very young, and all on my own, a long way from home, so I was quite vulnerable … but, on the whole, it wasn’t as bad as it could have been.’
She never went into any more detail about the seedier side of her modelling life – at least, not with me – preferring instead to reflect on the good times. How she stuck at it, how she learned the business, how she worked really hard and gradually built up a name for herself, until eventually – at the age of nineteen – she was offered a contract by one of the top three modelling agencies in the country.
‘And within a year,’ she told me proudly, ‘I was travelling all over the world and earning more money than I’d ever dreamed of. I bought a car, a flat in London … I had money in the bank. I had everything I’d ever wanted, Lil. Everything …’
But she didn’t.
Her mother, by then, had drunk herself to death, and her father was serving a ten-year sentence for manslaughter.
She didn’t have a husband.
She didn’t have a child.
She was still all alone.
But in 1958, on her twentieth birthday, she met a man called Rafael Garcia.
Thirty years earlier, at the age of fifteen, Rafael had left his home in Mexico and illegally crossed the border into the USA. Within a few months, he’d not only made his way to Los Angeles, he’d also managed to find himself work as a gopher in the movie industry. It wasn’t much of a job – making tea, running errands, that kind of thing – and the movie company he worked for was basically a Mafia-controlled money-laundering operation. But in the same way that my mother made the best of a bad job, so did my father. He stuck at it too. He learned the business, he worked really hard and gradually climbed the ladder, until eventually – at the age of thirty-seven – he directed his first feature film.
By the time Rafael met my mother, he was forty-five years old and had already directed or co-directed over a dozen films. Most, if not all, of them were dreadful – B-movies, cheap horror movies, run-of-the-mill Westerns – but while Rafael might not have had much creative talent, he knew how to make films that raked in the money, and that’s why he eventually became one of the most sought-after directors in Hollywood. His films didn’t cost very much, they didn’t take long to make, and they never pretended to be anything more than mindless entertainment. When you went to see a Rafael Garcia film, you knew exactly what you were going to get: excitement, thrills, a fair bit of violence, and lots of sexy girls. His films weren’t explicitly sexual or anything – especially not by today’s standards – but they were fairly raunchy for their time, and that was the main reason for their commercial success.
When Rafael met my mother, at a VIP party celebrating the premiere of his latest movie, he was already in a relationship with the star of the film, a relatively unknown young actress called Barbara Shelley. He’d previously been involved with another young starlet called Deborah Layne, who’d appeared in one of his earlier films, and there were rumours that Rafael had been with her on the night she’d committed suicide some years earlier, but that he’d left her apartment before the ambulance had arrived … rumours that he strongly denied. But there wasn’t any doubt that he had a history of dating much younger women, especially the young actresses who appeared in his films, and when he met my mother – who, at the time, was on a modelling assigment for a cosmetics company, and was generally regarded as one of the most beautiful women in the world – he fell for her immediately.
After the VIP party, in the early hours of the morning, she went back to his luxury apartment with him, and for the next couple of weeks they were barely out of each other’s sight. Within the month, they were not only engaged to be married, but Rafael had also promised her a starring role in his next film.
The next few months were the happiest days of my mother’s life.
Living with Rafael in Los Angeles, soaking up the sunshine and the celebrity lifestyle, taking acting lessons, making plans for her wedding … she absolutely adored every moment. The marriage took place in October that year, by which time she was already pregnant with me, and when they left the wedding reception for their honeymoon, and were driven off to the airport in a shiny white limousine, my mother still didn’t know where they were going.
‘It’s a secret,’ Rafael kept telling her. ‘You’ll find out when we get there.’
My mother didn’t really care where they were going, as long as it was somewhere exotic, somewhere hot, somewhere romantic, and – knowing Rafael – she was sure that she wouldn’t be disappointed. But ten hours later, when the private jet finally landed, she realized – with a sinking heart – that they were actually back in London.
She thought at first that it was just a stop-over, and that they’d soon be flying off to
their real destination, but when they got off the plane and got into another limousine, and the limo drove off, leaving the airport behind …
‘Where are we going now, Rafa?’ my mother asked, trying to keep the disappointment from her voice.
‘I have a present for you,’ he said, smiling. ‘A wedding present.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘We’ll be there very soon.’
When they arrived in Hampstead, and the limousine stopped outside a huge old gothic house, and my mother slowly realized that the house was her wedding present … she simply couldn’t believe it. It was so big, so dark, so monstrous, so ugly …
‘What do you think?’ Rafael said to her, smiling. ‘Isn’t it splendid?’
She just stood there, unable to speak, gazing up at the blackened stone walls.
‘I knew you’d like it,’ Rafael went on. ‘As soon as I saw it … I just knew you’d fall in love with it.’
My mother looked at him. ‘You bought this?’
‘Of course.’
‘But what about the house in Los Angeles?’
He shrugged. ‘We live there, we live here … LA for work, here for your home. For our child.’ He looked at my mother. ‘America is no place to bring up a child.’
‘But what about the movie –?’
‘We shoot the movie here, in London.’
‘Really? I didn’t know that. I thought –’
‘We start in two weeks.’ He smiled at my mother and patted her belly. ‘Before you get too big.’
‘But what about –?’
‘Hey,’ he said, putting his finger to her lips. ‘No more questions, OK? No more work talk. We’re on honeymoon, remember?’ He took her by the hand and started leading her up to the house. ‘You’re going to be very happy here, Mari,’ he assured her. ‘I can feel it in my bones.’
Rafael stayed in Hampstead while the film was being made, but as soon as shooting had finished he flew back to Los Angeles to begin editing the movie, leaving my mother all alone in a house she hated. The film – a third-rate gangster movie called The London Mob – was no better or worse than any of his other films. My mother’s performance though – playing the part of a gangster’s moll called Rita – was awful. She looked really good, and her Cockney accent wasn’t quite as laughable as some of the other actors’ attempts, but the undeniable truth was that she simply couldn’t act.