by Lisa Jewell
‘Yes,’ she whispered.
‘There’s nothing like it,’ said Lulu, watching her. ‘But don’t leave Ralph out in the cold for too long. For all your sakes. Christ, at least give him a BJ, that’ll buy you a few weeks’ grace!’
Jem looked at her sister and her sister looked at her and then they both began to laugh uproariously.
Chapter 7
In Santa Monica the sun was surrendering itself over the Pacific Ocean in roily ribbons of peach and copper. Ralph sat in the passenger seat of Smith’s car and watched it in awe. On his left, Rosey held the steering wheel loosely with one hand whilst tuning the radio with the other. Unlike Smith, she drove with the windows down and the air conditioning off, and the early evening breeze swept thick licks of her hair across her cheeks, which she would occasionally push back behind her ear with two fingers. She wasn’t making any attempt to converse with Ralph. ‘I can’t talk before a gig,’ she’d explained, ‘I’m too sick with nerves.’ But Ralph was glad. All he’d done since he arrived in California was talk. He wanted some silence, just a moment or two, to absorb his surroundings, to taste his aloneness, to wonder how he was feeling.
His family seemed a long way away. He’d spoken to them three times since he’d been here, including a Skype chat with a web cam last night that had left him feeling a little unsettled, watching the luminous, ghostly image of his daughter, resplendent in a pink hoodie and bunny ears, bobbing up and down restlessly in his swivel chair, showing him things she’d made that day at nursery, happy to talk to him but clearly not missing him in the slightest. Blake had been presented to the camera as a furled-up ball of sleep, his new hair glowing in the light of the monitor like a halo of fur. Then Ralph had spoken to Jem, who’d looked tired and pale, and underwhelmed by the experience of speaking to her three-day-absent partner. It was as though they’d communicated across a galaxy. It was as though the air between them had been sucked away into a black hole the moment the computer was turned off, like waking from a dream and swiftly losing the sense of substance, the detail. They were there. He was here. Between them was just endless space.
‘You hungry?’ Rosey broke into his reverie.
He contemplated his stomach. ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘a bit.’
‘Taco?’
He smiled. Taco. The last notion a peckish person in Britain would conjure up out of hunger. ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘why not?’
She drove them into a drive-thru Taco Bell and ordered for the two of them. A moment later she handed him a large cup of Coke and something in a box. On inspection it was a crispy shell the shape of a flattened hedgehog, sprouting spikes of red pepper and frills of lettuce and weighted down with a brown sludge of mince and creamy sauce.
‘It’s better than it looks,’ said Rosey, ‘honest.’ She herself had a much more discreet-looking pancake roll stuffed with something yellow. ‘I don’t normally eat this sort of shit,’ she said, watching his expression with amusement, ‘just a treat to calm my nerves before a show, you know. Go on, get stuck in.’
He worked his way through the taco silently and in as businesslike a fashion as he could manage as they continued on their way out of town. He wanted to appreciate the experience of eating a taco in a car in California with a beautiful woman he barely knew. This would never happen to him again.
‘So,’ said Rosey, a few moments later, ‘what’s it been like, catching up with Smith after all these years?’
Ralph rubbed his face with a cheap paper napkin and considered the question. ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘it’s good. It’s great to see him so happy, you know.’
‘Wasn’t happy in London then, eh?’
‘No. Not really. It wasn’t really coming together for him then. He was, well, kind of pretending to be something he wasn’t.’
‘Whilst all the while secretly yearning to be a laidback California reiki dude?’
Ralph laughed. ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘something like that.’
‘You must have made the odd couple, back then, you the artist and Smith all stiff in his City suits?’
‘I guess we did.’
‘So how did you get together in the first place?’
Ralph pressed the napkin into a ball inside the palm of his hand and related a story from a lifetime ago, a story of two grammar school boys with nothing in common except a foreign exchange student from the States called Sherelle. She’d been lodging with the Smith family but had taken a shine to the sooty-eyed, soap-stiff-haired Ralph and pursued him into a frenzied sexual relationship, mainly within the confines of the guest bedroom in Smith’s liberal house. Smith, who’d always assumed that the gangling, slightly fey Ralph was gay, looked upon him with newfound respect and Ralph, stultified by his life as an only child with two ageing parents, began to look forward to the time he spent in the loud, messy and easy-going Smith abode. They’d found themselves starting jobs in London at the same time and within a year Smith had put down a deposit on a flat and asked Ralph to move in with him. They’d spent ten carefree years barely conversing, getting stoned and watching too much telly. And then, just as it had taken a girl to bring them together, it had taken another girl to pull them apart. Their flatmate. Jem.
‘You mean Smith was dating your wife?’
‘Girlfriend.’
‘Girlfriend?’
‘Yeah. I came home from a party one night, she was in his bed.’
‘No way!’ Rosey’s eyes were alight with the scandal of it. ‘And you were in love with her at this point?’
He nodded. ‘Totally,’ he said.
‘Oh my God, you must have been gutted. And did he know, did Smith know that you had the hots for her?’
‘No. In his defence, no, he had no idea, but it was extra galling because he didn’t even really like her that much. He was …’ He was about to tell her about Cheri. He was about to tell her how Smith had been almost psychotically in love with the girl who lived on the top floor of their house, a girl called Cheri, a dancer with hair the colour of expensive Sauvignon and a total disregard for anyone who couldn’t immediately improve her situation. He’d been obsessed with her for the best part of eight years, even whilst sharing a bed with Jem, and there was a story, a terrible story, that Ralph would love to share with Rosey, the story of how Smith had humiliated himself in front of strangers and lost his real girlfriend and his imaginary girlfriend within the blink of an eye, but as much as it was one of Ralph’s favourite ever stories and as much as it would have brought joy to his heart to be able to retell it to this stunning girl sitting to his left, Ralph found himself feeling curiously loyal to his oldest friend and left it there, untouched, untold, maybe something to bring out on another day. ‘He was in love with somebody else,’ he finished circumspectly. ‘He was just using Jem, really, using her to make himself look more unattainable. But it didn’t work.’
‘Yeah,’ said Rosey, clicking the indicator on to left, ‘that shit rarely does. Us women aren’t as stupid as we look. Well, here we are.’ She brought the car into a space outside a building that looked curiously like a church hall. ‘And there are the guys.’ She got out of the car and waved at a bunch of young men, all wearing grey T-shirts and faded jeans, all fresh of face and long of hair and bright of teeth. There was something about them that reminded Ralph of an advert from the early nineties, possibly for chewing gum. Or possibly for a fizzy drink. He couldn’t quite remember which.
She wandered towards them and kissed them each in turn. ‘Hey,’ she said, turning towards him, ‘this is Ralph. He’s a buddy of Smith’s, from London.’ Ralph shook various hands and smiled and said hi and then followed Rosey and ‘the guys’ through the church hall and into a small room at the back where the band proceeded, in their own words, to hang out. Rosey disappeared without a word and someone handed Ralph a bottle of beer and he perched himself against a low bookshelf, feeling vaguely awkward amongst all the camaraderie and easy banter.
‘So, what is this place?’ he asked, during a quiet moment.
>
‘This?’ said a guy whose name was Ryan. ‘It’s just the community hall for this neighbourhood. We’ve played here before – it’s cute. You know, it’s a good chance to do something intimate for our fans, but really, we prefer to play the big festivals.’
‘What are you called?’ Ralph asked.
‘We’re called Pure & Simple.’ Ryan said this without a trace of embarrassment.
‘Oh,’ said Ralph, resisting the urge to grimace and say: shit, that’s the worst band name I’ve ever heard. ‘Cool,’ he managed.
‘Yeah, it’s good. And you, what do you do?’
‘Oh,’ said Ralph, ‘I paint. You know. Art.’
‘Cool,’ said Ryan, nodding appreciatively. ‘And you make a living with that, do you?’ He smiled apologetically and laughed. ‘If that’s not too personal a question?’
Ralph smiled. ‘No,’ he said, ‘it’s fine. And yeah, I do. Not a lot, but you know, just enough.’
‘That’s cool,’ said Ryan again, ‘that’s my goal. You know, make this pay, give up the day job.’ He finished his beer from the bottleneck and slammed it down on the tabletop. ‘Right,’ he said, ‘I think we’re on. I’ll see you out there.’ He winked at Ralph and picked up his guitar before leaving the room followed by his identikit band members. Ralph sighed. He had a strong and unassailable feeling that Pure & Simple were not going to be quite his kind of thing. And as the playing field behind the community centre began to fill up it soon became clear to Ralph that neither were their fans going to be quite his kind of people.
There was something peculiar in the air, something intangibly wrong. It was impossible to define, just a feeling that the people surrounding him were there for something other than the rock and roll, a feeling that he was not amongst like-thinkers. There was an eagerness in the air that he had never before encountered at a gig, a fervour that went beyond excitement. He stood towards the edge of the gathering and he sipped his beer and he waited for what he was now quite sure was going to be a revelation.
The band wandered on to the stage. Rosey was luminous in a white sequined slip, her blonde hair pushed behind her ears, her lips painted rose pink. ‘Hello!’ said Rosey.
A hundred fans shouted hello back. ‘It’s good to see you all!’ she shouted again. ‘We’re all gonna have a great great GREAT night!’ The band built up a riff behind her and she tapped out the rhythm with her white Converse sneakers against the stage, the audience whistled and hollered and clapped their hands in the air above their heads and then Rosey sang. At first Ralph was so mesmerised by the vision of Rosey, the light from three lone spotlights catching the white sequins and turning her into something celestial and divine, her mouth wide with words and song, her hair swinging back and forth with the rocking of her body that he failed to notice the content of her lyrics. In fact, he failed to notice the content of the lyrics of the next three songs until a man next to him, whipped up into some state of frenzied joy, took to a chair, cupped his hands around his mouth and yelled out, ‘Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Christ ROCKS!’
A woman to his side turned and beamed at the man on the chair and hollered, ‘AMEN!’
Ralph blinked, slowly and calmly.
OK, he thought to himself. OK. This is FINE. They’re only Christians. Do not panic. Do not panic.
He looked once more at the quintet on the stage. Pure & Simple. Did that mean that they, then, were a Christian rock band? And did that in turn mean that the edgy, husky, slightly dangerous Rosey was also a Christian? He looked at the cross around her neck. It was so small, so innocuous, nothing more than a pretty piece of silver, an adornment for her pretty neck. He mentally replayed the few brief conversations they’d enjoyed over the past forty-eight hours and at no point did he recall a mention of Jesus, of Christ, of prayer, of conviction or faith. At no point had she appeared wide-eyed with love for Our Lord or quoted the Bible or tutted at a casually uttered word of blasphemy. In fact her language was far from gentle, it was laced with Gods and Christs and even the occasional Jesus fucking Christ. She oozed something both cool and carnal, something fundamentally in control. She did not seem like someone who needed the crutch of organised religion in her life.
The rest of the gig passed in a blur. Beyond the occasional Jesus- and love-related hollers from the crowd, there was nothing to suggest that he was listening to Christian rock. They were good songs, on the whole, the band played well, Rosey sang with guts and soul. Not, as he’d suspected, his kind of music, but really not too awful.
After the show, Ralph found Rosey on a deck chair behind the church hall, sipping water from a plastic bottle and chatting with a fan. He waited for the fan to slink away before taking a seat next to her and saying: ‘Congratulations. That was excellent.’
‘You liked?’ she said, wiping a lick of water from her upper lip in the manner of a weary cowboy.
‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘I liked. You sing very well.’
‘Why, thank you!’ she smiled at him, languorously, her tone set as it always was, somewhere non-specific between cynical and bullet-straight upfront.
‘Christian rock?’ he said a moment later, having tried and failed to find a less direct way of asking about the genre.
‘Hah!’ she slammed her beer bottle down against her lap. ‘Yeah! Christian rock! Woo!’
Ralph glanced at her, trying and failing to gauge her inference.
‘I guess so,’ she said eventually. ‘I guess if you had to give us a “tag”,’ she made the quotes with her fingertips, ‘then, yeah, that would be it. But, you know, it’s not as clear-cut as that. I mean, I’m not even a Christian.’
Ralph felt something hard and abrasive inside his chest melt to liquid at these words. Such relief, but he had no idea why. ‘Oh,’ he managed.
‘Yeah. I believe. You know. I believe in, you know, the spiritual, like, completely. I go to church. I say my prayers. I have a relationship with God. And I guess I have a very Christian outlook on life. But Christian with a small c. If such a word even exists.’
‘So, how come you’re in this band. How come –’
She interrupted him. ‘Saw an ad. Applied. They liked me. I liked them. They were prepared to overlook the fact that I don’t live my life according to some screwed-up words in a really weird old book. I was prepared to overlook the fact that they are a bunch of cheesy Jesus-loving old fucking virgins. We hooked up. We made it work. And yeah, now I’m on the Christian rock circuit. Woo!’ She wound her fist in the air and then rolled her eyes.
He looked at her, unsure what to say next.
‘Are you shocked?’ she asked.
Ralph shrugged.
‘Yeah, you Brits, you’re so scared of God, aren’t you?’
He scratched the back of his neck. ‘It’s not that I’m scared of God,’ he said, ‘I just don’t believe he exists. Therefore I’m scared of people who believe in him. It’s like … it’s like being with someone who believes in leprechauns or believes in the tooth fairy. It makes them seem a bit mad.’
Ralph inhaled sharply. That last sentence had just slipped from his lips inadvertently.
But Rosey laughed out loud. ‘I know,’ she said, ‘I know exactly what you mean. It’s tough having a God thing, knowing that most of the people you come into contact with think you’re a loon, and I do question the God thing.’
‘You do?’
‘Yeah, constantly. All the time. I mean, I am a bright girl and I know that logically, rationally, there is nothing to suggest that the big man exists. I’ve tried the Bible and frankly it just goes over my head. But still, it’s there, when I talk to him, I can feel him listening. When I’m in a church I can sense him watching. And I like having him around. You know.’
‘And Smith …?’
‘Smith has his own spiritual shit going on.’
‘He does?’
‘Yeah, he does. Not in the conventional sense, but yeah, he has a relationship with something bigger than himself.’
Ralph blinked.
‘You are freaking out right now, aren’t you?’ she asked with a twinkle in her eye.
‘Just a bit,’ he replied.
She smiled, almost fondly. ‘You shouldn’t, you know. It’s just another way of living. It’s just another way of making sense of it all. It’s nothing to be scared of.’
‘Hmm,’ said Ralph, rubbing his chin, ‘try telling that to the fundamentalist, terrorising, murdering nutters of the world.’
‘Oh, come on,’ she rolled her eyes, ‘if they weren’t doing it for God they’d be doing it for something else. It’s just a pretext.’
They fell silent for a moment. Ralph picked at the paper around the neck of his beer bottle and stared into the dark trees. Cicadas chirruped in the shadowy grass, someone was plucking at a guitar round the corner and the air was honey warm. He wasn’t in the mood for a shouty discussion about organised religion. ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘you’re probably right. A nutter’s a nutter’s a nutter.’
‘So, you want to come to the pub with us?’
‘Us?’
‘Yeah, me and the guys. It’s tradition. After a gig we go to the pub. I get drunk. They get tipsy and call me a heathen. It’s a hoot.’
‘But what about the car?’
‘The pub’s right next to my apartment. I’ll park up and we can walk.’
‘And how will I get back to Smith’s?’
‘Cab. I can lend you some cash if you need it?’
‘No, it’s cool. I’ve got plenty.’
‘Great, I’ll call Smith, see if he wants to come along when he’s finished his class. He won’t, but it’s only polite to ask.’ She winked at Ralph and Ralph smiled. There was something flirtatious in the wink. And there was something dangerous in the invitation. Ralph felt too strongly attracted to this woman to be spending any more time with her away from Smith. But on the other hand, there were still a million things he didn’t know about her that he wanted to find out.