by Jessie Jones
‘Fantastic seats, Mark,’ I said.
‘Yeah, my dad promotes these gigs so tickets are never a problem.’
What had he just said? His dad was in the music biz? The night was getting groovier by the minute. ‘Is he here tonight?’ I asked, thinking backstage party, meet band, get whisked to LA in private jet …
‘Uh-huh,’ Mark said, interrupting my fantasy, ‘he’ll be backstage somewhere.’
‘Who are we seeing again?’ He’d told me in the car, but I hadn’t been paying attention. I was all ears now, though – now that I knew we had an in.
‘They’re called Trinity.’
‘Oh, like her in The Matrix. I loved her in that film.’
‘Er, yeah,’ Mark said vaguely – I don’t think he could have seen it. ‘Anyway, I’ve seen them a couple of times before. My dad discovered them, actually. They write all their own stuff and everything. You’re going to love them … Well, I hope,’ he added nervously.
‘Of course I will! Why wouldn’t I?’ His apprehension was making me nervous too. Was this group going to be really hardcore or something? You know, the sort of band that rejected boring old things like tunes in favour of deafening twenty-minute guitar solos and vomiting on the fans at the front, i.e. on me?
‘No, you’ll absolutely love them,’ he said, sensing my unease. ‘They really know how to rock and the great thing is that two pounds from every ticket goes straight towards the AIDS crisis in Africa.’
‘That’s fantastic,’ I gushed. I was slightly surprised at first because I’d been under the impression that two pounds from every ticket usually went straight up the drummer’s nose. But then I remembered Live Aid and Sting’s campaign to save the rainforest and something Chris Martin had said on Radio One (yes, I’d tuned in to his interview – I couldn’t help myself) about buying Fair Trade washing powder or something. Yes, the whole giving to AIDS thing totally rocked. Big time! Whoo!
This was amazing. I was combining a rock concert with doing something worthwhile for once. I couldn’t wait for the performance to start. I took a moment to look about me and check out the rest of the audience. They all looked strangely calm and somehow clean-cut. Not exactly short backs and sides, but no acres of bared and tattooed flesh, no spiky Mohicans, no beer-stained T-shirts with vile messages. There was no time to dwell on them, though, because Mark’s arm went around me and I snuggled into him, feeling happy and comfortable. I loved the way my shoulder fitted in just nicely under his armpit and how his gorgeous curly hair smelt of shampoo, and if I glanced to my right I could see the most delicious lips that I was going to kiss just as soon as he’d finished reciting the Lord’s Prayer …
The Lord’s Prayer!?
What the –
Total confusion.
First of all a bizarre flashback to infant assembly and me wondering why we were saying ‘Hello be thy name’. Then the realisation that it wasn’t just Mark, but also a man on the stage, standing at the microphone and leading the entire audience in prayer.
I was seriously freaked out.
But hang on, I asked myself, exactly how many of these gigs have you been to? Precisely none, I replied. So how did I know what the etiquette was? And wasn’t that what Madonna had done in Truth or Dare? She’d got her dancers into a little huddle and prayed, hadn’t she? If it was cool for Madge …
‘That was my dad,’ Mark whispered as the house lights dimmed.
‘Who was?’
He nodded towards the man who’d led us all (well, everyone except me) in prayer and who was now departing the stage. That was his dad? He looked like an office administrator. That is, he looked exactly how you’d expect a middle-aged dad to look. He didn’t look like a music biz promoter. My confusion was deepening, but there was no chance to get my bearings because big spotlights finally lit up the stage and there was an explosion of cheers. I adjusted my eyes to the brightness and, yes, there was Trinity. Oddly, there were five of them and they did look like a rock band in a straight kind of way. They certainly hadn’t been influenced by Marilyn Manson, but I guessed that was probably a good thing. They were dressed in jeans and T-shirts and the singer was even wearing a back-to-front baseball cap, the hip little so-and-so.
But he was also banging a tambourine.
This in itself wasn’t especially uncool – I was sure that John Lennon must have rattled one of those from time to time – and the music sounded OK. Not a sound that was going to set the charts alight, but it wasn’t horrible either.
No, none of that was the problem … But there was something weird about it all, something I couldn’t put my finger on … at least not until tambourine man started to sing. It took me most of the verse to figure it out, but by the time the chorus kicked in things were pretty clear. He definitely wasn’t singing about his woman or his Harley Davidson or where his next fix was coming from. Despite the fact that he was giving it the full Ozzy Osbourne, the words coming out of his mouth were, ‘God is good, God is great, good on yer, God!’
OhmyGod (so to speak), Mark had brought me to a religious concert.
I was surrounded by Jesus freaks, hundreds of them, and they were gagging for it. Honestly, I’d been to Take That and *NSYNC concerts before and the hysteria had been only slightly worse.
I looked tentatively at Mark. I thought for one idiotic moment that he might have been as gobsmacked as I was – maybe he hadn’t been expecting this either. But, no, he was loving it, no doubt about it.
I wondered if the first song had been a one-off. Perhaps now that the band had got Jesus out of their system, they’d move back onto more familiar turf and sing about sex and drugs. But it wasn’t to be. It was song after song after song about God, God and yet more God. Everyone around me was screaming and cheering, while I remained dumbstruck. I was trapped in a world that I hadn’t even known existed. When was it going to end? Maybe it never would and I’d be stuck here for eternity.
‘Brilliant, aren’t they?’ Mark yelled in my ear five or six songs in.
‘They’re … absolutely …’ Absolutely what? I wondered. As I said, I was dumbstruck.
‘What’s wrong, Dayna?’ Mark asked, sensing trouble.
Oh, what was the point? I couldn’t ask him to leave his beloved Trinity and take me home and I couldn’t just walk out – I couldn’t do that to him. I decided to grit my teeth and see this through to the bitter end.
‘Nothing!’ I shouted. ‘Nothing at all! They’re absolutely brilliant!’
I surrendered then. I submitted to the might of God Rock and started whooping and hollering along with the rest of them. I was a bit half-hearted, admittedly, but I did my best. I only screwed up once, letting out a particularly loud and squeaky ‘Whoo!’ at the very moment the song went quiet to allow the keyboard player to do a delicate tinkly bit. Everyone looked at me like I was the one. Not the Chosen One, obviously, but more as in, ‘There’s always one, isn’t there?’
I gritted my teeth through a fourth (or was it a fifth) encore and then, luckily, that was it. Trinity finally left the stage and, despite the deranged screams of their fans, they didn’t come back. It was over! I could go home and –
‘Come on, then, Dayna,’ Mark said, grabbing my hand. ‘There’s a party backstage. Let’s go meet the guys.’
Seemed it hadn’t quite finished after all.
My very first after-show party rounded off the evening’s total weirdness. There were no groupies or sugar bowls filled with cocaine and there wasn’t even any alcohol. And the strangest thing of all was that before the clingfilm came off the trays of sandwiches, Mark’s dad actually said Grace. Jimi Hendrix, Michael Hutchence and Sid Vicious must have been spinning in their graves.
As I watched Mark visibly glow at the thrill of meeting his heroes, I tried to work out where I stood on the God question. I’d never given it any serious thought before, but now it was the only thing on my mind. I thought that I still wanted Mark in my life, but did I want Jesus as well?
As lovely
as he was, I couldn’t get my head around it all. To be honest, maybe I could have lived with Mark’s faith if it had been a bit more … er … normal. You know, the kind that expressed itself privately in a nice, quiet church on a Sunday morning while the rest of the world (particularly me) was still in bed. But no, his was the kind that went off its head a bit, all swaying and chanting in a weird let’s-get-stoned-on-God kind of way. Suddenly Mark seemed no different to the Jehovah’s Witness people you glimpse as you open the front door before quickly slamming it shut again, or the gangs of orange Hare Krishnas who bound up to you on Oxford Street. It was all a bit too in-your-face for my liking.
I asked myself, did I mind all of that? Did it really change anything?
I have to say that the answer was yes, it did.
I did a terrible thing next. I didn’t actually finish with Mark. But I didn’t carry on dating him either. The vision of him turning into a freaky hippie at the concert had burned itself onto my retinas and wouldn’t leave me alone. It was just too disturbing and I couldn’t face seeing him again. But I couldn’t face him with the truth either. He was just too nice, damn him, and I couldn’t hurt him like that. So I just let things fizzle out, which was pathetic and dishonest and cowardly and so like me.
He called me. A lot, actually. I gave him one lame excuse after another. He was persistent, but he wasn’t stupid and he got the message eventually. The calls stopped and then I felt really terrible. He was such a lovely guy – easily the nicest I’d met – and he hadn’t deserved being treated like that.
I honestly, truly didn’t mind what anybody’s beliefs were. We all believed in something, I supposed, even if it was only the Curse of Hello!. But from now on, Mark would have to get on with his religion on his own.
Mark had been as close to perfect as I’d got. He was practically a saint. And I’d dumped him because I couldn’t handle the fact that he occasionally liked to big up Jesus. My loss, I supposed, and I was almost certainly going to burn in hell for it.
I did do one good thing as a result of meeting Mark though. I went out with Archie again. Hang on, hear me out. It was just for a drink and absolutely nothing happened.
‘Fancy a beer?’ he’d asked cheerily, as if there was no baggage between us. I thought about declining, then remembered Mark’s ‘There’s good in everyone’ speech.
‘OK,’ I said.
What did I think I was going to achieve? Turn thirty years of prejudice on its head and transform him into a wishy-washy liberal? Actually, yes, that was my aim exactly. We were in a pub near my flat and I really went for it. I suspect he was after a shag for old times’ sake, but that was never going to happen and my direct approach took him by surprise.
Didn’t get me anywhere, though. He had an answer for everything and it usually consisted of a statistic that he’d probably made up, and because he’d plucked it out of nowhere I couldn’t possibly argue with it. The other problem was that, although he was obviously completely wrong about everything, he knew a damn sight more about politics than I did, which left me at something of a disadvantage. But you had to give me credit for trying. Mark would have been proud of me, if he hadn’t at that moment been praying for my lost soul.
‘You’re so wrong, Archie,’ I said, draining my glass in readiness for my parting shot. ‘Everyone has a place in the world.’
‘Exactly,’ he said. ‘A place in the world. Not in this bloody country.’
‘You know what I mean. Can’t you just enjoy people’s differences instead of hating them for it?’
‘You’ve got me wrong, Dayna. I do enjoy people’s differences. That’s why I liked you. You were like no one I’d ever met before.’
‘Thanks,’ I twittered, only momentarily forgetting my mission. ‘But it’s no use respecting only some people. You can’t be choosy about it. You have to extend that goodwill,’ I told him Mark-ishly. ‘To everyone.’
‘Look, I’m not some sort of monster, you know,’ he said indignantly. ‘I’ll respect anyone’s differences as long as they’re not rubbed in my face. People have to stick to their own. We weren’t made to mix. I’m telling you, the Jews had that one sussed a long time ago. They were screaming for their own homeland, weren’t they, but they don’t like it when we …’
I tuned out as he tried to paint himself as the most reasonable and tolerant man in Britain, one who loved blacks and Jews and Asians so long as they were at least an international flight away.
Such a shame, I thought, because if you didn’t listen to what he was saying, he really was so nice to look at.
8.5 cm
‘I got here as fast as I could, darling,’ Suzie pants as she runs into the room. ‘Forty minutes door to door. Not bad, eh? My God, hang on … Agghh! … Sorry, just had to get that out. I’m just so excited. Look at you! Amazing! How are you doing?’
‘Nnngyyy-aarrrgghhh!’ I reply.
‘Is there anything I can do? What can I get you?’
Since I’m not about to come out with anything more coherent than another scream, Emily answers for me. ‘Don’t worry, Suzie, there’s nothing you can do. It’s just good that you’re here.’
I think so too and my slightly more muted screech of anguish confirms it. As the latest contraction subsides, I focus on Suzie and attempt to smile. But my face freezes when I catch sight of someone hovering slightly behind her. He’s peering nervously over her shoulder.
It’s Mark!
‘How did you know which room we were in?’ Emily asks Suzie.
‘Oh, I heard the screams out in the car par––’ Emily’s slit-eyed glare stops her in her tracks. ‘I mean I bumped into the midwife outside. She said you’re nearly there, Dayna!’
She lunges forward to hug me, but shrinks back as my body tenses for another contraction. The gap between them is down to seconds and the urge to push is now intense. But Midwife Maureen told me to hang on for just a bit longer. Just one more centimetre, she said, and I should avoid any unnecessary rips or tears. All this agony and that to worry about as well. Jesus fucking Christ!
Speaking of Jesus … Mark!
I want to say something.
But can’t. Too. Busy. SCREAMING!!
If Maureen doesn’t get back here sharpish, I’m going to be in deep shit. Where the hell is she? Oh yes, gone to rustle up an audience. ‘I’m going to get Jo,’ she said before she left. ‘She’s one of the other midwives and she can help me now we’re on the home straight. Oh, and Doctor Singh’s with a few med students – only six or seven. He’d like to talk them through a delivery … You wouldn’t mind, would you?’
Hell, no, bring them all in, I told her. Why not the cleaners and the maintenance guys too? And John Motson to do some commentary for the DVD. What the hell did I care? Honestly, I couldn’t give a shit because right now there are far bigger things to worry about, like –
Arrrrggghhhhhhhhhhh!!!
Yes, things like that.
Antenatal classes? Don’t make me laugh! Sitting cross-legged on exercise mats, your hands serenely cradling your bump, practising breathing. What kind of preparation is that? Where’s the pushing out a bowling ball practice? Or shitting a watermelon? Or squeezing an elephant through the eye of a needle? Or …
Are you getting the picture?
I think the people in this room are.
Mark’s face has bleached white.
Emily is a human statue.
Suzie’s facial contortions are trying but failing to keep pace with mine.
Labour virgins, all of them.
A fat lot of use they’re turning out to be.
No. 6
I loved my new job. OK, I know I loved every new job I’d ever had (apart, obviously, from Kool Kutz), but I LOVED this one. Thank God, because loving it was the only compensation for the fact that for weeks after I’d taken it Emily wouldn’t talk to me. ‘You’ve really let Max down,’ she pouted. Aw diddums, I thought, I’m sure he’ll come to terms with the disappointment. But then she hit me
with, ‘And you’ve really let me down. What am I going to do with myself now?’
‘Er, get a job?’ I suggested.
‘Max doesn’t want me just going on someone’s payroll. He says it’s demeaning. That’s why he wanted me to set up a business.’
‘So set up a business, then.’
‘But I can’t do it on my own. I need you.’
‘Come on, Emily, the business thing was never going to happen,’ I said, deciding at last to be honest with her. ‘We’re just not ready for that sort of thing. I think we were only ever doing it for Max.’
‘How can you say that?’ she protested. Loudly. ‘He was only ever doing it for us. He just wanted to give our lives meaning and purpose and –’
‘No, he just wanted to give himself something to brag about,’ I said, possibly being a little more honest with her than I’d intended. ‘He just wants to be able to say, “Ooh, look at me, aren’t I clever? Only twenty-seven and I set up my girlfriend and her little mate in business.”’
She stalked out of my flat at that point. And refused to talk to me for weeks.
Never mind, because I loved my job. I loved the fact that I was putting money back into the bank for a change. I loved my posh clients and their big, fat tips. And I loved working with Hannah. Yes, I’d ended up in Knightsbridge at the Spa Space. Our boss was fantastic. She was called Mila (‘Say it Meeeeeeeelah, darlink’ – she was from Romania) and she also owned the place. Every Monday, our quietest day, she’d shut the salon at five for a staff chill-out session. We’d have drinks and nibbles, loll around the sauna and Jacuzzi and perform treatments on each other. What a brilliant idea! Who would have thought of a thing like that? Only some kind of Eastern Bloc new-age genius and I loved her for it.