by Louise Voss
A FAMILIAR HAND
IT REALLY WAS GOOD TO HAVE MY HEARING BACK TO NORMAL again. As I drove despondently home from Ron’s office, I tried to remind myself to at least be thankful for small mercies. But it seemed a bit pointless, really, like everything else in my life. The option of a glass eye, the ability to hear pins drop, one-off kisses from sweet guys and lisped songs about stormy weather—what was any of that to me now? I could bear all of it, all the bad stuff, if only I still had Sam to help me. But I didn’t, and I couldn’t.
The tide was high as I drove down the gravel road to my house, water lapping over the top of the rushes and reeds on the bank. It was almost up to the riverside footpath, washing up detritus from a careless consumer society, cans and plastic and yesterday’s news. I knew that by the next day when the water had receded, I’d be left with all those scraps of litter, plus the faint smell of sewage and lots of mud outside my front gate. It was the least pleasant part of living near the river. Oh, well, I wouldn’t be going out tomorrow, so I wouldn’t have to see it.
I pointed the remote control at my electric gate, and it heaved slowly open to let me through. As it clanged behind me, I thought once more how nice it would be to never leave the house again.
Pulling off the wig and glasses, I felt my body relax slightly as I climbed out of the car clutching the meager brown envelope from Ron. I was looking forward to holing up inside for another long stint of wallowing in solitude.
As I headed for the front porch, a small but familiar sound filtered in through my newly responsive ears. It was emanating from the bushes—a series of crunchy little clicks, ensuring that my terrible day was made even worse. I knew what that noise was, I’d been dreading it for long enough.
Cursing myself for removing my disguise prematurely, I dithered for a split second: Should I run inside, or stay and fight? Then all the rage and grief and disappointment from the day boiled up inside of me, and there was no contest—whoever was out there wasn’t going to get away with it this time.
With a huge painful bellow, I charged toward the bushes. There was an alarmed rustle, and the glint of a camera lens being hastily retracted. As I crashed through the scratchy greenery, I saw a skinny back spin around and try to head for the gate, but his camera strap had become entangled with a branch and he lost valuable seconds trying to extract it. The delay enabled me to get close enough to grab the strap, and to see the hand of the photographer pull at the camera itself. He was wearing a black balaclava, but once I’d seen his hand, my suspicions were confirmed. I didn’t need to see his face.
The bitten nails, the shape of the ovals of wrinkles at his thumb joint, the nicotine stain on his middle finger from so many Gauloises—this was a hand that had given me a thousand orgasms, belonging to a person who had given me a thousand more sleepless nights.
“COME HERE, VINNIE, YOU EVIL LITTLE SHIT!” I roared at the top of my voice, as we engaged in an unseemly tug-of-war in the shrubbery. “I’M GOING TO KILL YOU!”
With one last terrified wrench, Vinnie hauled the camera strap out of my grasp and legged it across the lawn, over the gate in one smooth leap, and away down the riverside path.
I ran after him, still screaming like a fishwife. “HOW DARE YOU! YOU WON’T GET AWAY WITH THIS! YOU BASTARD!”
But he was out of sight by the time I got to the end of my drive.
For the fourth or fifth time it occurred to me that the day really couldn’t get any worse. Turning back to the house, I stooped like an old lady to pick up the letters and cards that had spilled out of the A4 envelope I had dropped after giving chase. They made a pathetic little bundle, scribbled messages of … what? Most likely they were from people whose records I had played, making them feel important for two minutes of their lives.
Suddenly I didn’t care what they had to say. I walked round to the dustbin next to the garage, lifted the heavy metal lid, and dumped the whole lot in, unopened, with the smell of rotting vegetables and stale take-aways. Slamming the lid down on the only feedback from my career as a DJ was a symbolic gesture, I knew.
It didn’t make me feel any better, though.
Randy Newman
I’LL BE HOME
THAT WEMBLEY SHOW WAS THE LAST TIME BLUE IDEA EVER PLAYED in England. A year later it was all over. Two years later I was still recovering.
It was a letter from Sam that finally spurred me into a decision. I had my whole life ahead of me and an exceptionally large bank balance at my disposal, but all I’d done for sixteen months was mope around rural New Jersey as though in extended shock.
I had been required to stay in the area for the duration of Mickey’s trial, because the prosecution needed me to give evidence, so I’d holed up at my parents’ new place, an architect-designed house in the countryside, ten miles outside of Freehold. I’d paid for most of it myself, so I figured that justified my extended residency there. My name was on the lease of a blandly luxurious apartment in Manhattan, too, but I’d moved out because the paparazzi knew the address.
I hadn’t even seen Sam since the band broke up. I was happy that she had a life of her own again, but I hated that I currently wasn’t part of it. She had eventually finished her law degree and was back in London starting her one-year postgraduate LSF course at Store Street. She was still frail, but well enough to move into a hall of residence.
We wrote to each other regularly—it was too problematic to try to get through to her on the pay phone in her digs—and she always asked me when I was coming over, preferably to live. But then she’d launch off into a description of her latest boyfriend, or what dinner party she’d been to, or what all her college friends were up to, and I would be assailed by such a feeling of alienation from this life that could have been mine. A normal existence! It felt as foreign to me now as a Martian existence. The only place I felt safe was within the whitewashed walls of my parents’ dream home.
Then I’d gotten this letter. I had noticed that Sam’s handwriting was getting worse, but I had put it down to the probable hurry with which she scrawled my letters, eager to get out and about with her new friends.
I’m writing this, …
I deciphered with difficulty,
… with my nose about an inch away from the paper. It gives me hideous backache, but the only alternative is to pile textbooks up to eye level in front of me and rest the letter on top of them. That method is fine for reading, but gives me cramps in my arms when I try and write that way. Even with Coke-bottle glasses my sight has gotten so bad—that bloody radiotherapy just completely screwed it up. Lectures are a nightmare. I’m having operations for cataracts in the next few weeks, and although I’m nervous, that should fix it. I don’t think it’ll be too bad—they just zap them with lasers, one at a time. I can’t wait to “see” you again. I miss you. Come and live in London! It would be so great. We can go to Salisbury in the holidays, it’ll be like the old days. I’ve been listening to Randy Newman’s Little Criminals a lot recently, and the track “I’ll Be Home” really makes me think of you. It’s so sad, and it makes me miss you so much. I just want you to be home, too …
I put the letter down, my mouth agape with shock. I thought only old people got cataracts. Sam was still by far the most important person in my life, and if something as serious as that was going on without my being aware of it, then something was very wrong with me. Why hadn’t she told me before?
I asked my mother that question when I found her in the kitchen taking a bubbling roast out of the oven. I got myself a glass of wine from the fridge.
“Would you like one, Mum?”
She was bending over the cooker with her oven gloves and apron on, her hair disarrayed from the steam.
“No thanks, Helena. Is that your second glass already? We haven’t even sat down to dinner yet.”
I ignored her. “Sam is having an operation for cataracts.”
“Cataracts? Oh, dear, that’s terrible! I didn’t know young people got cataracts.”
“Ne
ither did I. It was those leukemia treatments she had.”
Mum tutted in a shocked manner, and stuck a long roasting fork into the center of the meat to see if it was done, sending a thin plume of steam up toward the ceiling.
“Why do you think she didn’t tell me? She’s having the operation next week and I didn’t even know she had problems with her eyes. She normally tells me everything.”
Mum turned the oven down to a Warm setting and put the joint back in while she strained the vegetables.
“She probably thought you had enough problems of your own, dear.”
“None as big as practical blindness, though!” I replied vehemently. But now that I thought about it, it was possible that I had maybe moaned rather excessively in my letters about how miserable life had been recently. In a flash I made the decision. I downed the rest of my glass of wine in one gulp. “I’m moving to London!” I announced.
My mother looked relieved. She had done a lot of laundry for me in the past year. I had bought her a brand-new washer-dryer, but still, laundry was laundry. She untied her apron and sat down next to me at the kitchen table, putting her hand over mine.
“I think that’s a great idea, Helena. You’re only twenty-seven; you should be out having a social life and making new friends, not cooped up here all day like a hermit. You miss Sam, and besides, I think it’s time for you to move on. I wish London wasn’t so far away, but I truly think that you would be happier back in England near Sam.”
I smiled at her. Whether she was trying to get me out from under her feet or not, I appreciated the good intentions behind her words.
Dad came home and I told him my plan over dinner. He, too, agreed that it was probably for the best.
“When will you leave?” he asked, spearing a forkful of meat and roast potato and trying not to sound too enthusiastic.
“As soon as possible. I’m going to start sorting through my stuff after dinner,” I announced firmly, placing knife and fork together on my empty plate.
The lethargy that had plagued me for months suddenly dispersed, and I felt adrenaline course back through my veins for the first time in ages.
When we all finished eating, my parents retired to the living room, Mum to call one of her bridge friends, and Dad to smoke his pipe and read The New York Times. I went down to the basement, where I had stored three big boxes of band-related memorabilia. I had not been in there for a year, as I had been trying to forget the band had ever existed. Leaning against the wall, in between Dad’s golf clubs and the brand-new mountain bikes I’d bought us all but we’d never ridden, was the battered guitar case containing my old, cheap secondhand bass, the one on which I’d learned to play.
I laid it down on the dusty carpeted floor, and with difficulty popped open the rusty clasps. I remembered how wonderful I had thought it the first time I’d set eyes on it at the Applebaums’ yard sale, how desperately I had wanted to have it. I hadn’t even known it was a bass guitar then! All I had known was that it had been, literally, the answer to my prayers.
I still felt guilty at the memory of the pure desire that had fueled my original acquisition of the instrument. To serve the Lord, if I was not mistaken, I thought ruefully, remembering my teenage fervor. In the grand scheme of things that guitar and I had done very little serving of the Lord, and a great deal of serving myself, the band, the record company, and Mickey’s bank balance. The Lord certainly gave me more than I bargained for. Perhaps this was His way of punishing me for transforming my religious ambitions into secular ones.
I lifted the guitar by its neck out of the cheap velvet-lined case. It emerged stiffly, like a corpse from a coffin. The pearly scratch plate I’d thought so pretty looked warped and yellowed with age, and the enamel of the guitar’s body was scraped and battered-looking. Everything about it was cheap and shoddy. I recalled how difficult learning to play it had been, and how I had been able to persevere only because I really believed it had been a gift from God. I put it back in the case and moved it to a space on the far wall of the garage, which was the start of my “to trash” pile.
Before getting stuck in, I ran upstairs and got my own CD of Little Criminals, and my Discman. Putting the headphones in my ears, I came back down to the basement and played track nine over and over again as I attacked the big sealed boxes, ripping off the brown tape holding the top flaps closed. It gave me strength, to think of Sam all those miles away listening to the same music for the same reason. “I’ll Be Home” was such a simple, moving song. I wished that I’d written it instead of Randy Newman. Blue Idea should at least have done it as a cover—we could have done a great version of it.
When I’d moved out of the New York apartment, I had just stuffed everything in these boxes, and a lot of the posters and album sleeves were creased or torn. I toyed with the idea of chucking everything out, but couldn’t quite bring myself to do it, so instead I selected one of every item in the box: a copy of each of our records, a press shot from each album, one copy of each Bluezine, programs from a couple of the bigger gigs we’d played. I picked up the program from the Radio One show at Wembley and something fell out. It was a photograph of Sam and me onstage, taken during Blue Idea’s set that day and sent to me afterward in a kind gesture by Holly in Ringside’s press office. I was very pleased to see it. At the time I had intended to make a copy of it for Sam, but had forgotten that I’d put it in the program to keep it flat, and later assumed it to be lost.
Everyone said that Wembley show was the best we’d ever played. It certainly felt that way. To me it represented what I perceived to be the very highest pinnacle of our success and my own personal sense of achievement, despite the fact that Blue Idea was just as hot for most of the following year.
The proudest part of all was when I sang “Over This,” turning away from the audience and beaming at Sam in the wings throughout the entire song. Out of the corner of my eye I noticed the front rows of the audience trying to follow my gaze to see who or what I was looking at. When the final note from Joe’s Hammond hung in the charged summer air, there was a moment of pure silence, and then an overwhelming storm of cheering and applause, which felt as if it would knock me off my feet with its warmth.
I ran forward to where Sam stood clapping, grabbed her wrist, and pulled her back onto the stage with me. “Sam Grant,” I’d said to the audience. “My best friend.” We’d hugged in front of all those thousands of people, and, strangers though they were, it felt as though they supported and understood us, too. Sam told me afterward that it was the best moment of her whole life, bar none.
I put the photo aside to send to Sam that very day. I could make a copy of it later, I thought, and borrow it back from her. Continuing to sort through the three big boxes, I found several gold and platinum discs, more photos, laminates, press interview schedules, masses of copies of Bluezine, and newspapers that had run features on us. I systematically junked most of it.
At the top of the third box was a copy of Rolling Stone, not the one with us on the cover, but an issue from a few months after that. I looked at the date: May 1992. I flipped it open and found the huge feature with the headline screaming out at me: BLUE IDEA BREAKS UP! They’d printed a photo that I absolutely hated—us leaning over a freeway bridge somewhere, shot from below, all concrete and steely gray skies. We all looked incredibly pissed off, I appeared to have an enormous double chin, and even Justin looked moronic. There were lengthy quotes from the four of us. I picked out a random paragraph and read:
“It really just seems the right time to move on. I’ve been writing a lot more songs lately, and making a solo record is a new and exciting direction for me. Blue Idea has come to the end of its natural life. We’ve been getting stagnant. I wish the others all the best of luck, and strongly encourage them to continue without me, if that’s what they want to do. I hope we will stay friends.”
Justin’s smug words brought back some of the anger I had felt at the time. Writing songs, my ass! He had churned out a few trite litt
le numbers that we sometimes did live, or used for B sides, but none of which Ringside or the rest of us wanted on any of the albums. His fans were in for a bit of a shock, in my opinion. Justin’s ego had been inflated to the point that he really thought he alone was the key factor in Blue Idea, and this was what I couldn’t stand. He might have been the good-looking one, but my songs and David’s and Joe’s excellent musicianship had been equally important.
The truth was, I had secretly been quite relieved when Justin dropped his bombshell. I was furious with him for making the decision for us, but we were all so tired. We had been on tour, whether in the U.S. or around the world, on and off for the best part of ten years, and when we weren’t on the road we were in the studio. I couldn’t remember when I’d last had more than two straight months off. It had gotten to the point where I simply didn’t have the energy or the inspiration to write any new songs. I felt completely drained. We had no private lives—we couldn’t even walk down the street without getting mobbed. Everyone knew who I was, but I had no real friends except Sam and the band. I’d had no time to make any.
To carry on without Justin hadn’t even been an issue; David, Joe, and I had not given it a serious thought. We did not want to become one of those sad once-huge bands who struggle on with the old name, but without the frontman who helped make that name.
“Let’s quit while we’re ahead,” David had said, and I’d agreed heartily. “We’re rich enough,” Joe added.
But it turned out that we weren’t nearly as rich as we’d thought. As soon as Mickey heard the news about us disbanding, he became impossible to contact. After trying to get ahold of him in every way we knew—including sneaking down to his office in disguise (to no avail, it was locked and empty)—I eventually phoned our accountant directly to find out what state our finances were in. I had never spoken to him before, as Mickey had handled our money from the start. He, too, had sounded shifty.