by Julia Crouch
She and Gareth kissed the children – all the children, because Rose had persuaded Gareth that they must treat the boys as if they were their own in that respect – and set off along the lane to the pub.
It was a cold, cloudless night, with the type of chill that froze into your sinuses and evaporated in your breath. The air made Rose’s eyes water slightly, bringing the moonlit hedgerow into sharp focus. Clarity, she thought, is what’s needed tonight. Just keep things clear.
They wandered down the lane, and Rose tucked her arm into Gareth’s. He talked about the night sky, about how it made outlines of the trees against the rim of the horizon. She was happy to listen to him.
They stopped and held their breath to hear the nothingness of the country night around them, until it was broken by the screech of an owl and the scream of something tiny. They moved on. As they neared the pub, which was on the outskirts of the village proper, streetlight took over from the moon and stars, and the clamour from within swallowed the silence of the night outside.
It was a full house inside, for sure. For someone with only a telephone and the postal service at her disposal – she claimed not to know even how to turn a computer on – Polly had managed to pull in an audience of two hundred or more, enough certainly to cram the Lamb. Rose looked around as Gareth went to the bar. With a few exceptions, this wasn’t a local crowd. The Lamb couldn’t have seen so many piercings and leather under one roof in all its five hundred years. There were quite a few raddled, excited thirtysomethings in black, necking what looked like Snakebite. These were obviously fans from the old days. But there were also some bettergroomed, more blasé types, drinking white wine and trying to get a reception on their iPhones, which, of course, as Rose knew, was impossible. These must be the industry people, the ones that could shape a future for Polly. An independent future. Rose was very glad to see there were quite so many of these people.
If it took off for Polly and she went back to gigging and recording all over the world, perhaps, Rose thought, she could look after the boys for her on a more formal basis.
Gareth brought her drink over and handed it to her.
‘There’s Jon,’ he waved across the bar. ‘Do you mind if I go and see him? He’s been on at me about joining the cricket team.’
‘How very Archers,’ Rose said.
‘My final assimilation into English culture.’ Gareth put his hand on his heart.
‘You go, then, you old Limey. I’m going to find a good spot for filming.’
She perched on a bar stool by the fireplace, quite near the front, where she could see over the heads of the standing crowd, and peered at the video camera, checking that it was on the right setting. She was always the one in charge of the camera. To look at their family photographs, one might think that she didn’t exist, because she was always the wrong side of the lens. Gareth took a lot of photographs for his work and said he tended to view any other camera use as a bit of a busman’s holiday, so it was left up to her. She didn’t mind though. She thought she was rather good at photography, that she had an eye for composition.
The phone rang at the bar. Rose felt a sharp prick of fear as she swung round to see Charlie the landlord pick it up. He laughed down the receiver, a nicotine-stained croak, greeting an old crony. Rose’s panic subsided into its usual remnants of a shuddering heartbeat. To calm herself, she looked around and tried to tune into the crowd. There was a definite trend for people to stand facing the stage. Every time there was a movement up front, there was a pause in the conversational buzz. They were waiting.
‘I’ve said I’ll go down to the nets next Wednesday. Anything to get him off my back.’ Gareth had crossed the bar and was standing at her side. ‘I’m just off for a smoke,’ he said, and disappeared again.
Rose drained her drink and, leaving her jacket on the stool, went up to the bar to get another. She wished Simon was there, but his absence was understandable. She tried to catch Charlie’s eye as he served the throng at the bar, but he wasn’t bestowing any favours tonight, and she had to wait what seemed an age to be served. So long was it, in fact, that she decided to buy a whole bottle of wine and tuck it over on the mantelpiece by her stool, to save having to go back.
She had just got herself settled when there was another, more definitive hush in the crowd. She looked up and saw Polly flit across the small raised area that did for a stage, guitar slung across her front. She stopped in front of a microphone and pulled it down closer to her mouth. Her lips were painted blood red, and she wore a long black dress that looked like a spider’s web. She appeared a little nervous.
‘Hello.’ She looked at the audience without a smile. ‘It’s good to be back.’
With that, the audience erupted into a passionate cheer, which brought a flicker of pleasure to Polly’s face. Rose set the video camera going. Polly bent down to her guitar and strummed a few minor chords.
‘I’m a widow and this is my story,’ she said through half-closed eyes. Then she launched into her first number.
Polly was on great form. Her voice soared from a low growl to a banshee wail in no more than a beat. Her new songs touched on pain, love, blood and death. All her anger and disappointment were unleashed there, in that tiny room. It was obvious, from the quality of their attention that, for many in the audience, the night was a transcendent, even transforming experience.
Rose once looked over to Gareth, who had come in from his cigarette at the first sound of Polly’s voice. The crowd had been too thick for him to make his way over to Rose, so he had positioned himself at the other side of the room, leaning against the bar in a slightly proprietorial way. Looking at him watching Polly, Rose felt uncomfortable. There was something in his face that she didn’t want to see; something that made her feel very ordinary, as if she wasn’t really worthy to stand in this room, listening to this music. She suddenly felt disappointed in herself, ashamed that she hadn’t managed to turn out as magnificent as her friend up there on the stage. The advantages that she had thought she had gained over the last ten or so years were obviously just some sort of mythology; she was back where she deserved to be, playing the triangle in Orchestra Polly.
Polly squatted and swung her guitar around as if it were her slave, bound to her hip. The crotch of her knickers was all on display, but in an earthily erotic way that went beyond any sort of sleaze. Rose was, for a moment, in awe.
She remembered very clearly one hot summer’s day when she, Polly and a couple of other girls were supposed to be doing shot putt, but instead were just lazing in the sun at the top of the games field. Rose and the others were sitting with their legs curled by their sides, tucking their short games skirts around themselves. Polly, however, sat splayed out, her skirt hitched up and everything fully on display. But there was not a spare pube protruding, nor a wet or grey patch to be seen on her pristine white knickers. Oh, to have that confidence even about that most difficult and wayward part of your body, Rose had thought then. And there it was again: Polly, still as unbridled, so easily on display. Like her thirteen-year-old self.
Rose, stuck there with the video camera, felt like a big lump.
The steady Eddie. That’s what Rose had become. The one who had done the sensible things. Her most outré, risky gesture of late had been to buy an old house and spend two years working hard to do it up. Not all that extraordinary, comparatively. Faced with the electricity on stage and the way it was holding this cool, aloof audience, she felt like the bourgeois, middle-aged housewife she had probably become – and by far and away the least exciting prospect in the room.
The twelve new songs that Polly played that night, together with the famous title track of Running Scared, her 1992 album, and a couple of other oldies, put the audience in the palm of her hand. Acoustic pieces, with only her own guitar-playing to accompany them, they nevertheless filled the small space in a way that seemed to transform even the smell of it.
At the end, the audience erupted. They stamped the ground, whooped, y
elled for more. People holding glasses tapped their heavy silver rings on them. Polly stood on the stage and, smiling, she put her hands together in a namaste then propped her guitar up against the wall and turned and walked through the audience towards the bar. People tried to touch her.
Rose, still filming, attempted to follow her path through the audience, but for the main, tiny Polly, who from the stage had filled the corners of the room with her energy, was swamped now she was down on the floor.
Rose was just putting the camera away when she heard a gasp in the crowd and looked up. A space had cleared around Polly, who was being confronted by a tall blonde woman in skin-tight jeans and an expensively soft-looking leather biker jacket. The woman was blocking Polly’s path, standing over her like an evil Disney witch. Rose craned her head to hear what was going on.
‘You know,’ the blonde woman was saying, ‘the fact that your husband has died is the only interesting thing about you.’
Polly was looking up at her with one hand on her hip, staring her out. The woman swooped forward and slapped her full on the face, catching her by surprise and cutting her cheekbone with a large diamond ring.
Polly went down, and five men, Gareth amongst them, leaped to her aid.
Another man, tall and dark, with a black fringe falling across his tired blue eyes, took hold of the blonde woman who was, it was now obvious, very drunk indeed.
‘You said you’d behave if we came here,’ he hissed.
‘During the gig, I said. DURING THE GIG!’ she snarled back.
Rose was quite put out that she had zipped the camera back in its padded bag.
‘How many times have I told you? It’s all in the past!’ the man was yelling.
‘I saw your face,’ she came back at him. ‘Don’t tell me you don’t still want it, that filthy little piece of stinking fish.’
He took her by the arm and hauled her away, out of the pub. Rose looked down at Polly, who was still on the ground, surrounded by a circle of men. One of them had got a glass of water from the bar and Gareth was using a napkin to wipe the admittedly nasty-looking cut that the woman’s ring had left beneath Polly’s left eye.
‘Are you OK?’ Rose leaned forward and asked Polly.
‘I’m fine.’ Polly smiled up at her, but her mouth was twisted. ‘Forget about it, won’t you? I know her from a long time back. She’s a mentalist.’
Gareth and another man – a great, glossed and suntanned bear of a man – helped her up.
‘Now what I need is a drink,’ Polly said, looking up at Gareth.
‘A bottle of champagne for the star, Charlie!’ Gareth yelled as he cleared her way to the bar. Someone slipped off a stool and offered it up to her.
‘It’s on the house, mate,’ Charlie said, and reaching behind the bar, he picked up a bunch of red roses and presented them to Polly with a bow. If she hadn’t seen it with her own eyes, Rose would never have believed that such a gesture could have come from this beer-bellied, pock-nosed, coarse-veined bloke. He was far better known for his ability to eject troublemakers by literally pulling them up by the seat of their pants and throwing them out into the road than for his way with chivalry and flowers.
Gareth poured the champagne and handed it out to Polly and Rose.
‘That was great, Poll,’ Rose said.
‘Thanks.’
‘Wasn’t it awesome?’ Gareth put his arm round Polly’s shoulders. ‘You’re not going to have any problems getting back into it, girl, are you?’
‘I dunno,’ Polly shrugged.
‘Excuse me?’ A well-spoken white guy with dreadlocks down to his waist came between Polly and Rose and held out his hand. ‘I was blown away by that.’
‘Thank you.’ Something in Polly that had been dimmed after the confrontation with the blonde woman was beginning to come back to life.
‘Jem Williams, Karma Records,’ the guy said.
‘Wow,’ Gareth said.
‘Cool,’ Polly smiled.
Rose’s attention wandered across the crowded bar, until her eyes came to rest on a figure leaning against the wall near the door, cradling a pint and looking right over in their direction. It was Simon.
‘Just going to the loo,’ she said to no one in particular, and made her way over to him. She couldn’t believe he was here.
‘What are you doing here? Who’s looking after the kids?’
‘They’re all asleep. I just slipped in for a quickie. Don’t tell Miranda,’ he said.
‘That’s the least of the secrets I’ve got to keep from her.’
‘I trust it went well, then. I didn’t get here until the applause.’
‘It was – brilliant,’ Rose said, searching for the word.
‘Great.’
‘Yep.’
‘Look, Rose,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry about the other week. I was a bit . . . lost. I just want you to know that, if ever you need to talk, I’m here. I don’t want us not to be friends. I miss our chats.’
‘I’ve forgotten about it already.’ She reached up and kissed him on the cheek. ‘But I’m only going to be your friend if you go back right now and babysit your children.’
‘Yes, ma’am,’ he said, handing her his drink. ‘I’m gone. Remember, though, just grab me – OK? Any time.’
‘Right,’ Rose said, although she didn’t quite know what he meant about her needing to talk. About what? He was the one in the state. She knocked back the remains of Simon’s pint and headed across the bar.
‘Where were you?’ Gareth put his arm around her.
‘Loo,’ she said.
He looked like he had been edged out a little. Polly was sitting on a bar stool, holding court. She was surrounded by a group of men who were listening with hungry, yet sympathetic faces to what she had to say. Rose noticed that the dark-fringed man from earlier was among them, standing right by Polly, so close that he must surely be touching her thigh with his own. He must have lost the blonde woman somewhere, Rose supposed.
‘Time to get back for Janka,’ Rose said. ‘You stay if you want.’
‘Nah, I’ll come back. I’ve got to be up early in the morning, anyhow,’ Gareth said.
They said their goodbyes to Polly, who looked like she was getting stuck in for the night. Outside in the lane, the moon had travelled over the sky, hanging in the night as if it were keeping a big, cautious eye on them. The air, while still chilly, had something of the smell of summer to it. Rose leaned against Gareth on the way home, glad to be out of the crowded pub.
Gareth laughed to himself.
‘What?’ Rose asked, looking up at him.
‘I was just thinking that tonight might find its way into a couple of autobiographies in a decade or two.’
‘It was an event, that’s for sure.’ Rose noticed that over in the far west, clouds were gathering, pastel grey in the moonlit sky. It was going to pour down later.
They went back to a calm household. The evening there had been uneventful. The children had gone to bed when they were told, no one had woken up, and yes, Flossie was fine. Rose and Gareth sent Janka away with twenty pounds, then – after Rose had checked that Flossie was still soundly asleep – they fell, slightly drink-dizzy and exhausted, into bed. For the first time in what seemed like months, she felt that she wanted her husband. She started stroking the small of his back and he turned to her and held her face in his hands. He kissed her then rolled her over onto her back, where he moved his mouth towards her breasts, first kissing, then sucking, then biting so that she yelped in surprise.
Not that she didn’t like it, but he had never been that rough before. He moved his hand between her legs and started gently stroking her until she was wet. Then he put one finger deep inside her, then another. He moved his fingers around inside her then pushed in a third and a fourth. It was making her wild, and she moved herself up and down on him. He pushed further, up beyond his knuckles until he finally, gently but firmly, slipped his thumb and whole hand right up inside her so he was wearin
g her like a glove puppet. This was all new. Their ten years of lovemaking had been, up to now, characterised by a gentle intimacy. She came quickly and explosively, bright lights exploding in her head, as she collapsed on his hand. He rolled over on top of her, took her fingers and closed them around his penis, pumping it furiously up and down until, with a cry, he exploded over her breasts, rubbing his sticky semen in and around her nipples.
‘I do love you, Rose,’ he said, and, turning his body onto his side of the bed, he fell instantly asleep, tangled in a sweaty heap in and around her legs. She lay there on her back, her vulva burning and still contracting from time to time. She hadn’t had an orgasm like that for years.