The Predictions

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

  ..................................................................

  CHAPTER 9

  London

  1985 to 1987

  IF GAVIN WAS DISAPPOINTED to learn of my upbringing, he chose not to talk about it, and within hours of returning to London, he acted as though the weekend had never happened. We resumed our routine, spending five nights a week at his bedsit and the remaining two apart, for no other reason than habit, and during work hours, as was our custom, we continued the act of secretary and boss. But as the weeks went by, I started to feel a tremendous pressure bearing down on my temples and I used this physical pain as an excuse to skip one or two nights at his bedsit, spending them instead in Fulham with Fran. When Fran asked me what was going on, I told her about the headaches, and she nodded her head and was thoughtful for a moment before suggesting that maybe I had cold feet.

  “About Gavin?”

  “Yes, about Gavin. You got together with him so quickly and a few months later—­bang!—­you were engaged.”

  “When the right one comes along, what’s the point in waiting?”

  “You think Gavin is the best you can do?” She was more amused than incredulous. “I mean, don’t get me wrong, he’s an okay guy and everything and probably good husband material—­whatever that is—­but I would never have picked out someone for you who was so fucking—­” She stopped.

  “So fucking what?”

  “So fucking boring. He’s like the Morris Minor of guys.”

  I shook my head, refusing to consider the possibility. “We don’t all go for unreliable jerks in tight pants and eyeliner, you know.” I was well aware this was a low blow but I had been thinking it for a while, and it was good to get it off my chest. “Some of us prefer guys who don’t have drug habits and who like to go out with one girl at a time.”

  Fran laughed. “Well, blow me. This whole time I thought I was just having fun, when it turns out I am a fucked up little slut.” She stood up and adjusted her cleavage so that it was even more pronounced than it had been before. “Jesus, Poppy, I can’t believe you grew up on a commune.” She still wasn’t pissed off—­just animated. “You’re the most uptight person I know.”

  “Uptight how?”

  “As in seriously uptight. Like you need to be sodomized in a dark alley by a highwayman in tight leather knickerbockers.”

  “Knickerbockers?” I didn’t want to, but I started laughing. “What are they?”

  “They’re old-­fashioned pants that, you know, finish at the knee.”

  “Oh god,” I said. “I think that’s what Gavin was wearing the night of the Christmas party.”

  “He was?”

  “Yes. He went as a king.”

  “Well, there’s your problem,” said Fran. “You were duped.”

  She was only joking, but she had planted a seed of doubt, and from that night on I began to notice habits of Gavin’s that I had willfully ignored. He ate the same thing for lunch every day (a plain ham sandwich on white bread from the greasy spoon on the corner) and for dinner, baked beans out of a can, without always warming them first. Under no circumstances would he try Indian, Lebanese or Greek food, and once, when I had made him a chickpea curry, he had balked not only at the mild spices but because it was vegetarian. From then on, I had only ever cooked what I came to think of as English food: eggs, chips, sausages, peas and Spam. But the food thing was just the beginning. I was more and more bothered by that sour smell, and his businesslike attitude in bed. On the few occasions I had suggested he might want to slow things down a little, or maybe try a different position, he had given me the same response he had when I suggested we dine at the local Thai restaurant. Trying new things was not in his repertoire.

  The strange thing was, Gavin did not seem to notice my growing discontent. In fact, the more I started to feel withdrawn, the more attentive and certain of our future he was. It was as though he had fixed upon the person he was going to marry, and as with his choice of food or sexual position, there was no going back. I was bound to him by his nature, by the very devotion I had cultivated in him, and most tightly of all by my prediction. Under pressure from Gavin, I agreed to set a date in the summer of 1987 for our wedding, far enough away—­nearly two years away—­that I could easily believe it might never happen.

  In the meantime, I used the pattern of absence established by my headaches as a way to spend more time going out with Fran. Three or four nights a week, I played fiancée to Gavin, cooking beans in his bedsit, while he read quantity survey reports and listened to Phil Collins and I caught up on my sleep. The remaining nights, Fran and I went out to pubs and clubs and drank up the atmosphere of boomtown London. Throughout the whole of 1986, I don’t think we paid for a single dry martini or flute of French champagne. Every establishment we went to was jammed with stockbroker bores who had so much cash to throw around it was falling out of their pockets. They made us feel as though we were doing them a favor by giving them someone to spend it on. Our usual routine was to start the night at one of these places, then just as the night was getting interesting and we had drunk our fill of champagne, we would move on to the kinds of underground nightclubs we preferred. In our wide-­shouldered suits and foxy black stilettos, with our frizzy little perms and eyes ringed with black, we thought we were so sophisticated. At least once a week, Fran went home with some good-­looking ratbag, but I never did, and that was how I justified it to myself.

  Sometime around the start of 1987 I even bought a wedding dress. It was a huge white meringue made from taffeta and lace that Fran and I had picked out at Selfridges one hungover Saturday morning and that took up half the wardrobe in our increasingly crowded Fulham bedsit. The wedding was to take place in an Anglican church near Gavin’s parents’ house, with a small reception afterward at a local hotel. Fran was going to be my bridesmaid but I would have no family in attendance. I had considered inviting Nelly and the mothers and fathers from the commune, and had gone as far as writing a letter, but in the end I didn’t see the point in sending it. None of them would be able to afford to fly over, and if they did, their presence would only embarrass the Crawleys. I was also terrified that someone from the commune would tell Lukas about my marriage. The thought of his ever finding out filled me with a terrible shame because he, of all ­people, would see through it.

  In the year leading up to the wedding, Fran and I upped our going out to four, sometimes five, nights a week, a schedule that Fran could chalk up to “research” but on my side was purely errant. I told Gavin that I was going to aerobics classes to look slimmer and more attractive at our wedding, and managed to sell the lie by dancing and drinking and not eating.

  One of our favorite haunts was Chelsea, which wasn’t far from where we lived, making it easier to get home at three in the morning and still get up for work the next day. On one of these forays, Fran took me to a new club just off the Fulham Road that was underneath what looked like an ordinary stucco house. She wanted me to see an unsigned band she had “discovered” and that she hoped was in need of a manager. “The lead singer is even hotter,” she said, “than Morten Harket.” She did not say much about their sound. The club had only just opened but was already hugely popular. We waited outside in a long queue of boys and girls in tight jeans and straggly T-­shirts, all with such big boufy hair that it was hard to tell them apart. It was a different scene than the one I was used to, and I had no idea what to expect when we got inside.

  The first room we went into had mirrors all down one wall, making the space seem bigger than it was. There was nowhere to sit, just a bar on one side and sardines everywhere else. Fran pulled me through the sardines to the other room, the source of loud driving guitar music and screeching vocals. I held her hand tightly and we emerged into a wall of noise, eye to eye with a four-­piece band shoved messil
y into an alcove, guitar cords and amp wires coiled like spaghetti at their feet.

  The band resembled glam rock shipwreck survivors, all hair and tight, shredded pants and torn tank tops—­the lead guitarist wore no shirt at all. He was whippet lean, tanned and full of himself, more so than the apparently hot lead singer, whose face was hidden behind a cascade of blond, spiral-­permed hair. To me they looked ridiculous—­and sounded worse—­and I questioned if this was the band Fran wanted to manage. But next to me, Fran had my arm in a vise grip and on her face was a look of intense determination.

  Their performance was intense, ferocious, like animals in heat, but it was also exaggerated, a pantomime of a rock band. At the end of the song, amid hysterical applause, the lead singer bent down to swig from a bottle of bourbon at his feet, then stood up and scooped the huge mane of hair out of his eyes, revealing his face.

  For a few seconds I stared at him, convinced I was seeing things, maybe even hallucinating. He seemed different, skinnier and older, but there was no mistaking that the man under all that hair was Lukas. My Lukas. I hadn’t seen him for three years, but it may as well have been three days, because everything that had happened in between fell away. All I wanted to do was run up and hold him and never let go.

  Several rows of excitable teenagers stood between us and I hesitated long enough that the next song began and the rabble started pogoing again, making it impossible to get to him. I had hesitated, and into that gap flew reality. The best thing I could do would be to turn around and walk out of the club and pretend I hadn’t seen him.

  But when I tried to pull Fran in the direction of the exit, she mouthed “No!” along with a violent shaking of her head. She had locked her elbow through mine and dug the nails of her other hand into the flesh of my upper arm. I was captive.

  Onstage, though I tried not to look, Lukas screeched out a slow number about the Cold War, of all things, his voice in a high register I didn’t know he could reach. It was their torch song, and the girls and boys around us closed their eyes in rapture.

  They played one more song, plus an encore—­a replay of the Cold War number—­then put down their instruments and crab-­walked off the stage, exiting sideways into a narrow, dingy corridor. The crowd dispersed, or tried to, then backflowed and settled into more or less the same position. Next to me, Fran burrowed frantically in her bag, surfacing with a pile of small neon-­lettered cards. “This is it,” she yelled. “The one I’ve been fucking waiting for.”

  “Are you sure this is the band?” I said.

  Fran laughed, almost hysterical with excitement. “Of course I’m fucking sure.” She shoved one of the little yellow cards in my hand. “Come with me.”

  I didn’t have time to study it—­Fran had grabbed me by the arm and was dragging me down the corridor and inexorably toward the door at the end of it.

  “Stop!” I said, spinning her around to face me as forcefully as I could. “We can’t go in there.”

  “Why not?”

  “The singer—­the singer in the band. It’s Lukas.”

  Her eyes flickered with confusion. “Lukas—­as in your ex?”

  “Yes,” I said urgently. “He can’t know we’re here. We have to leave.”

  Fran stared at me for a moment, weighing the situation, then turned and banged loudly on the door. “But that’s so un-­fucking-­believably perfect,” she said. “You can introduce us.”

  She didn’t wait for a response, but shoved the door open into a small room with a low ceiling, lit by a single flickering tube. In the center of the room, a bunch of guys stood around a table with beers on it, and they turned around and stared at us. None of them was Lukas.

  “Excuse me, ladies?” It was the guitarist. He had actually put his shirt back on and came and stood in front of Fran with his hands on his hips. “I know it’s not the Albert Hall but it might have been decent to knock.” He spoke with a toffy accent, totally at odds with his appearance.

  “Easy, tiger,” said Fran. “I’m not here to fuck you.”

  The guitarist turned to the other guys and laughed. “Then what do you want?”

  “I’m here on business,” said Fran, her sharp tone betraying nerves. “I’d like to talk to your manager.”

  The bass player, very pretty, smirked. He raised his eyebrows at the drummer, and the pair of them, at the same time, mouthed “Manager?”

  The guitarist ran a hand through his black curly hair. “That’s me.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I thought,” said Fran. She thrust one of her business cards into his hand. “I’m Frances, and this is Poppy, my assistant.” Her assistant?

  “Marlon,” said the guitarist, taking the card and squinting to read it. “F-­One Management?”

  Fran nodded. “As in ‘Formula One.’ ” She paused. “And ‘Frances’—­and all the other ‘F’ words you can think of.”

  “I get it,” he said. “I just haven’t heard of it.”

  “You will,” said Fran. “At the same time everyone hears about your frickin’ awesome band.”

  Marlon cocked his head to one side—­she had his attention. Behind him, a sliding door opened, and Lukas appeared, silhouetted in the bright light of a bathroom stall. He had his head down and was trying to lace up the fly of his leather pants, and despite the resolve I’d had not to see him, there it was again, the impulse to throw myself at him as though no time had passed. He looked so different but all I could see was the boy I had grown up with, the same one I had teased and chased through orchards and shared a room with every night of my childhood. In the few seconds before he clocked me, I passed through every emotion from panic to joy to sadness and regret.

  Then he saw me, and for a moment I knew what it felt like to be a ghost. He looked behind him into the bathroom and then again at me. “Poppy, is that you?”

  I nodded. We held eye contact, and as we did so, a woman drifted into my sightline and stood next to him. She was tall and striking and leaned her arm on his shoulder. “And who do we have here?” she said, her accent posh, like Marlon’s.

  “Serena,” said Lukas, turning to her. “This is Poppy.”

  “Poppy,” she said, looking me over, until something registered. “You’re the girl from the commune, aren’t you?” Everything about her was so confident, so nonchalant, that I wanted to punch her lights out. I hadn’t answered her question, and as the silence grew, Fran, Marlon, and the others turned expectantly and stared at us.

  “Yes,” I said eventually, mustering all my self-­control. “Lukas and I grew up together.”

  Fran, never one to miss an opportunity for bluntness, said, “Wasn’t it a bit more than that?”

  Lukas said, “Yeah, it was,” and Serena folded her arms, not at all threatened, and added, “We thought you’d gone back to New Zealand.”

  “Well, it looks like I didn’t.”

  “Poppy,” said Fran, “I’m sure there’ll be plenty of time for a reunion later but right now we need to talk business.” It was her way of rescuing me, but also of bringing her agenda back on track.

  “This chick wants to be our manager,” said Marlon, addressing Lukas.

  “Really?” he said, sounding genuinely amazed. He gave Fran a quick, appraising look and then smiled. “That’s great. We bloody well need one.”

  Marlon softened. “We do.” He studied Fran’s card. “It takes F-­One to know one,” he said, and held out his hand in Fran’s direction.

  “You won’t regret this,” she said, taking the offered hand and shaking it firmly.

  I worried they had jumped into things too quickly, but I kept my reservations to myself, more troubled by the momentous new turn in my personal life.

  We sat down to toast the new venture, and I watched and listened with admiration as Fran plied her new charges with beer and whiskey and comprehensively mapped out the next five years o
f their career. She seemed to have it all worked out, from how to shape their image to what kind of sound they should develop to stay ahead of other bands. I wondered how she knew all this stuff, and then I realized how badly I had underestimated her. This whole time, she really had been “researching” the up-­and-­coming bands of London, and not just sleeping with them. While Fran charmed everyone in the room, I played the part of her assistant, going to the bar to fetch drinks and taking notes when she asked me to, grateful to have something to do. For the past hour, I had tried not to make eye contact with Lukas, but the second I dared to glance in his direction he was already looking at me, and our eyes locked on and everyone else vanished. I didn’t think Serena had noticed—­she seemed so unflappable—­but then, after another one of my forays to the bar to fetch a round of whiskey, I came back to the greenroom and she and Lukas were arguing in the corner. They were trying to keep their voices down, and when Lukas saw I had reappeared, he tried to end their discussion. I didn’t see what happened next—­I was busy handing out drinks—­but when I looked again, Serena was putting on her coat, and then she coolly said good-­bye to everyone and left.

  I started drinking too much whiskey. I didn’t know what else to do. The meeting went on, and then at some point it stopped being a meeting and started to be a party. And then it was after three a.m. and everyone was drunk and standing on the pavement outside the club, deciding where to go next. I had been avoiding so much as a sweep of the eye in Lukas’s direction, but now he put his arm around my waist and pulled me to him and whispered in my ear: “How long has it been since we fucked?”

  “Excuse me?” I was genuinely offended, but elsewhere in my body, something woke up that had been asleep for a very long time. “Aren’t you going to ask me where I’ve been for the last three years?”