“So not even a T-shirt then?”
“Actually, there is this.” She went over to another dresser and took out a folded black garment, which she carried over and threw, gauntletlike, onto the bed. “You probably recognize it.”
Serena stood over me, waiting for my reaction.
I unfolded the T-shirt—it was one that had belonged to Lukas, a favorite from our Auckland days, bearing the logo of the Flying Nun record label. I had worn it myself once or twice, though Lukas had always asked for it back. We were strangely possessive of our clothes, the minute we had some of our own. “Thanks,” I said, masking my disquiet. I did not want to get changed in front of Serena and asked if I could use her bathroom.
“Of course,” she said, smiling. “Help yourself.”
I went in and shut the door. The T-shirt seemed tainted, but I put it on anyway, noticing that it had been ironed, probably by Aggie. Had Lukas given it to Serena or had she “borrowed” it from her brother’s flat? From the triumphant way she’d handed it to me, I guessed the former, but I tried not to let it get to me.
Quite why anyone needed her own exclusive bathroom was beyond me until I clocked the obscene amount of stuff she had: dozens of lipsticks, lids carelessly thrown aside; lip liners, eyeliners, pantiliners, and pencil sharpeners; eye shadows of every hue and texture; at least three hair dryers; a set of curling tongs and another hair tool whose metal teeth joined in a perfect zigzag line. There were skin creams and depilatory creams and hair pomades and razor blades, a dozen cans of hairspray, some lying on their sides, others with broken nozzles. And in among all this was a long flesh-colored plastic tube with a tapered end, the likes of which I had not encountered. I picked it up to take a closer look and found a switch on the side, which I flicked on at exactly the same moment as I began to have an inkling what it was. The thing hummed loudly in my hand, startling me, and I dropped it on the vanity unit, where it skittered among the lipsticks, its sound amplifying against the marble to a loud buzz.
Seconds later, I had switched the thing off, but when I came out of the bathroom, Serena was smirking.
“I see you found my vibrator,” she said. “Did you have fun with it?”
For so many reasons, I was profoundly embarrassed. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know that’s what it was.”
Serena laughed. “You’re kidding, right?”
“I’ve seen . . . other ones,” I lied. “But not one like that.”
“Gosh,” she said, “so Lukas wasn’t making that up.”
“Making what up?”
For a tantalizing moment, Serena looked like she was about to tell me, before changing her mind. “Nothing. Nothing at all.”
I climbed into the bed opposite and pulled up the covers, her words whirring in my head as she turned out the light. What had Lukas made up that had to do with a vibrator? I wasn’t sure we had ever talked about one, but then I began to see that was the point. One by one, and against my wishes, the pieces of a puzzle started dropping into place. However unlikely it seemed, had Lukas’s education, the one I had already benefited from, been at the hands of this toffee-nosed little bitch?
I woke in the morning feeling sure of it, and would have skipped breakfast were it not for the intoxicating smell of freshly baked croissants.
Besides Aggie, I was the first to the kitchen, a room even more cavernous than it had seemed the night before, with marble counters and cupboards that went on for miles and were decorated with what looked like garden trellis but was only a painted effect. Aggie beetled around it in her starched white apron, her knotted legs as sturdy as tree trunks. The table was laid with croissants; a sharply angled pat of butter, just out of the fridge; and three types of marmalade and jam in fluted white ramekins. I had never stayed in a hotel, but this was what I had imagined breakfast in one to be like.
I said hello and introduced myself by name, and without asking anything more or ascertaining my right to be there, Aggie pulled out a chair for me at the table and reappeared seconds later with a fresh pot of tea and another of coffee. She then discreetly withdrew to the far recesses of the kitchen, where she seemed to be engaged in a flurry of baking and food preparation; I couldn’t help wondering for whom.
I felt uneasy, sitting idly at the table while she bustled about, and wondered if I should get up to help. She was being paid, handsomely I hoped, to do what she was doing, but still it seemed wrong for a woman her age to be toiling so hard while I sipped coffee and gorged on croissants and jam. On the commune, the concept of one person waiting on another would have been considered immoral.
Presently, Serena floated into the kitchen, and Aggie was soon at her side, pulling out the chair. “Good morning, Miss Serena,” she said chirpily. “Did you have good sleep?” Her English was less than perfect, in syntax more than accent.
“It was frightful,” she replied. “I’ve so much to do. I simply don’t know how I’m going to get through the day.”
Aggie smiled. “You will have beauty nap.”
Serena nibbled on a croissant but was already on her second cup of black coffee. “That reminds me, I shan’t be needing lunch. I’m going out. But I’ve left a dress on my bed that needs dry-cleaning.”
“For tomorrow?” said Aggie.
“Tonight. There’s a party.”
I was on my second croissant and thought I might help myself to another if Serena left the room. They were so delicious, all butter and air, not like the dense, earthy bread we had grown up on. When she did finally get up to leave, on her way out Serena turned to me from the doorway. “You don’t need to come back upstairs, do you?”
“No,” I said. “And I can’t stay tonight, either.”
“I don’t need you to.”
When Serena had left, Aggie came back to the table. “You are new friend?”
I didn’t see the point in lying to her. “Not a friend, exactly, no.”
“I think for myself you are not.”
I laughed. “Is it that obvious?”
Aggie smiled, pushing the plate of croissants in my direction. “You like these? I make more. You take for lunch.”
It was a Friday, the Communists’ last day in the studio, but I spent it at work, avoiding Gavin, though I didn’t know what for—he would never have alluded to our relationship while under the roof of B, B & B, and I had no intention of going anywhere else with him. Late in the evening, when I had returned to the mews flat, Lukas finally appeared, eye sockets hollow, spirits high, perhaps too high. He was wired, a little absent, not himself, but I put that down to fatigue and sat around on the banquettes with the rest of the band, drinking wine, smoking cigarettes, trying to tune into their vibe. When they had relived, in exhaustive detail, the highlights of the recording session, they got out their guitars and noodled long into the small hours, making frequent trips to the bathroom, in groups of two or three, which at the time I thought odd, but for the wrong reasons. At around three or four in the morning they finally called it a night, and I lay on the behemoth with Lukas, comfortably drunk, and feeling content that I was at last alone with him. He passed out. The next morning, Lukas woke surprisingly early for someone who hadn’t slept for three days. I was aware of his getting up off the couch before I was properly awake, and when I did surface, I had to go and look for him. The door to the bathroom was ajar, and I found him hunched over the sink, sucking crumbs of white powder up his nose with a rolled-up banknote.
“What are you doing? It’s nine in the morning.”
He stared at me, red-eyed, and held up a tiny, empty plastic bag. “There was only a bit left—I didn’t want to throw it out.”
“So you thought you’d have it for breakfast?”
Lukas sniffed, an ugly, phlegmy sound. “Sorry—it gets stuck in my nose.”
He had dodged my question, and I didn’t press it. “You must be exhausted.”
“Actually I feel great.”
“Because the demo’s finished?”
“Yep, and it sounds fucking amazing.”
A lot of things happened very quickly after that, as though our lives were on fast-forward. I would go off to work, then come back to the mews to find that several new developments had gone down while I was out. The demo of “Frozen Hearts” went out to record companies and while most were not interested, some guy in Manchester, of all places, drove all the way down to London to sign them the same day he heard it. Lukas described him as “just a really cool guy,” and not at all what he imagined the owner of a record company to be like. His name was Spike, and, Lukas reported, the first thing he ordered the band to do was to change their name—the communist thing sent out the wrong message. “Get away from politics,” he told them. “Hard rock is all about sex.”
“You didn’t change it, did you?”
“We had to or he wouldn’t sign us.”
I suddenly didn’t want to hear the new band name—instinct told me it would be awful—and Lukas must have sensed my apprehension.
“We couldn’t think of anything—so he kind of chose it for us.”
“Just tell me what it is.”
“Cheatah,” said Lukas, a little sheepishly, “like the animal but with ‘e’ and ‘a’ at the beginning.”
I had nothing to say. For so many reasons, it was dire.
“Do you get it?”
“Yeah, I get it. Cheatah, as in, ‘He cheats on women.’ ”
He was so pleased he hugged me. “That’s so cool you get it. Spike said everyone would—but I wasn’t sure.”
I worried that Lukas didn’t know what he was getting himself into. I feared it would all end badly, but I didn’t want to bring him down, so I kept those fears to myself. In any case, at that juncture, I was wrong. “Frozen Hearts” came out as a single and, after several weeks bobbing up and down in the low hundreds, went to number thirty-seven on the charts—a wild success for an unknown heavy metal band. They were invited onto Top of the Pops, as one of the novelty filler bands near the beginning, before the really big acts appear. Nevertheless, when we exited the back door of BBC Studios and walked across the parking lot to climb into the Bedford van, Lukas and Marlon and the boys were mobbed by squealing schoolgirls waving autograph books in the air. None of these girls knew who they were, but they did this to every band that came out of the stage door, capturing signatures and pop star sightings and stories to tell their friends back at school. “Bags the blond,” I heard one of them say, and the girl next to her said, “Hands off, Tracy, he’s mine.”
After all the dead-end bands Lukas had been in, all the aborted concerts and recording sessions and bust-ups, he was about to experience overnight success. “Frozen Hearts” went to number twenty-eight on the charts, and they raced back into the studio to cut an album—paid for this time by the record label. At this point Fran, who had all this time been working as B, B & B’s mail girl, decided to quit her job and become a full-time manager. She turned out to be very good at it—pushy but switched on enough to know when to pull back—and she didn’t make the mistake other girls made of falling in love with someone in the band. She had even made sure to sleep with Marlon as early on as possible, she told me one night, to get it out of the way.
“When did you do that?”
“After Top of the Pops. You remember we all went to that club in Soho? The one with the posh toilets?”
“No! Not there.” There’d been a cloakroom attendant, lots of velvet, and heavy, wood-paneled doors. “How did he even . . . ?”
“I don’t know. The long hair. Maybe she thought he was a girl?”
“But he’s so tall.”
“Yeah,” said Fran. “That was awkward. Like trying to mount a penny-farthing.”
“I thought maybe he was gay—he never brings home girls.” I didn’t add that I thought he was in love with Lukas.
“Shit, no,” said Fran. “He’s just a sneaky fucker. Doesn’t like to spray in his own backyard.”
“Before we got back together,” I said, “I think Lukas was shagging Serena.”
Fran shrugged. “Probably. But who’s he shagging now?”
“Me.”
“Just you?”
“I think so.”
“Well, then,” she said. “What’s the problem?”
She was right. Much as I couldn’t stomach the idea of Lukas and Serena together, he had dropped her the minute I had come back on the scene, and I couldn’t ask for more than that—especially not when I hadn’t told him about Gavin.
The following month was a haze of going out, getting plied with free drinks, meeting loads of people, forgetting who they were, going somewhere else, repeating the cycle, then coming home to Marlon’s and falling asleep in the wrecked conversation pit, which Lukas and I had come to think of as our bedroom. Our worldly belongings were piled up on one wing of it, with another set aside for sleeping, and the third side left bare in case anyone else wanted to crash there. Once or twice we had woken up to find Marlon asleep with us, or had gone to bed with him there, only to find that someone else—Vince or Fran—had taken his place in the night. It was a while before I realized that Lukas and I were never alone, that we had replaced our pack of seven with another exactly like it: the guys in the band plus me and Fran and Serena.
Lukas noticed it too. “It’s just like old times,” he said one night, glancing around at everyone seated at the dining table of the mews flat and grinning. “Seven kids. No parents.”
There used to be seven of us, I thought, but not anymore. “Don’t you ever wonder what happened to Fritz?”
“I try not to think about it. But sometimes I do. That and all the other weird shit that went on.”
“I can’t believe you still hate the commune so much.”
Lukas refilled his wineglass, spilling some over the sides. “I don’t hate the commune—not the place itself. But I do hate the lunatics who brought us up. They had no right to experiment on us.”
“They didn’t experiment on us.”
“The way we were brought up. Not knowing who our parents were. Lying to us. Don’t you think that counts as emotional abuse?”
“I don’t know. In lots of ways, we were lucky.”
“Poppy, it was a total head fuck.” He was drunkenly serious. “Who does that shit? They fucking poisoned us. It was like Jonestown or the Manson family. That stuff makes you crazy.”
“It was nothing like that. Nobody abused you or made you have sex with your mother.”
“Well, you are kind of like my sister,” said Lukas. “And sometimes I feel like I’m crazy—don’t you?”
He was scaring me. “You’re not crazy.”
“You’re right. I’m perfectly normal.” He widened his eyes so that he really did look mental, then planted a kiss on my cheek. “I love you and you love me. There’s nothing to discuss.”
“But I do love you,” I said.
He smiled. “Then relax.”
Marlon had rolled a joint, lit it, and casually started smoking it as if it were a cigarette. He passed it around, and everyone toked on it except me.
“What I don’t get,” said Marlon, “is that if you chaps grew up on a commune, then how come Poppy’s so straight? I can’t even get her to share a joint, let alone sleep with me.”
“Maybe I don’t fancy you,” I said, which wasn’t wholly true. It would be impossible to meet Marlon and not think about sex, what it would be like with him. “It just wasn’t that sort of commune. They were more into composting toilets and astrology.”
Marlon pretended to yawn. “How utterly tedious.”
“What about Shakti?” said Lukas. “Didn’t she sleep with everyone?”
“Really?” I said. “Like w
ho?”
“Shakti?” said Marlon. “Was she some kind of Indian deity?”
“Californian,” I said, which made Marlon laugh out loud.
“Well, Hunter definitely had a crack,” said Lukas. “But she preferred women, and, um”—he paused here and flushed slightly—“young boys.”
“Oh yes,” said Marlon. “I bet.”
“She worked her way round everyone, even Elisabeth,” continued Lukas. “Remember how they all used to visit her caravan to ‘get their charts done’?” He laughed. “Charts, my arse.”
“But she did do their charts. They told me about it.”
Lukas raised his eyebrows. “Did you ever see one?”
I had to confess that I hadn’t. “But that’s how she decided what to put in the predictions.”
“The what?” Delirious excitement flashed in Fran’s eyes. “What the fuck were they?”
I said nothing, waiting to see how Lukas would answer.
“Poppy, you tell them,” he said, grinning waggishly and nudging my elbow. “Tell them all about our rite-of-passage thing.” He glanced at Marlon. “You’ll love this, man. It’s very National Geographic.”
I hesitated. Talking about the predictions seemed like a perilous topic in light of the trouble they had caused between Lukas and myself—and yet he was the one who had made a joke of it. Perhaps it was safe to proceed.
“When we were sixteen or seventeen,” I began carefully, “there was this ritual. Kind of like an initiation ceremony. Shakti took us all up to the top of a hill—there was some chanting, and she pricked our fingers and put the blood into a bowl. And then she made predictions about our future. She said they were based on our astrology charts, plus other stuff like palmistry and tarot. She predicted that I would . . .” The room had gone quiet, spellbound, as if I was telling a ghost story, and with everyone staring at me, waiting to hear my prediction, I lost my nerve. “She predicted I would go overseas.”
The Predictions Page 16