by Louise Voss
Although I didn’t know them very well, Toby and Ruby were going to be the hardest people to leave behind, because they represented the only part of my life that might possibly look to the future.
Ann Peebles
I CAN’T STAND THE RAIN
OUR TRIP TO SANTORINI ENDED UP BEING POSTPONED UNTIL THE following spring, not only because of my new career as a DJ, but also because Sam started feeling iller and iller. Within five months she’d had to leave her job and move back to the basement flat in Salisbury again. She got a part-time position in a local solicitors’ office, but even that was a strain. Every time I talked to her she sounded more wheezy and exhausted. She qualified for a disabled parking sticker, started popping an array of Day-Glo tablets, and had to embark on a program of physiotherapy to try to clear her malfunctioning lungs.
I was worried sick. If it hadn’t been for the job, I would have moved to Salisbury to be with her, but by that time I’d been promoted to the breakfast show, and had to get up at five o’clock every morning as it was. Commuting, even in my new 5-series BMW, would have been a nightmare. Instead I sped down to see her as often as I could on weekends, taking her tapes of my best shows from the previous week and entertaining her with stories of who I’d met, how the New World ratings were going up, what songs I had played and for whom.
I did believe that I had dumped Vinnie for good, but somehow, when he turned up on my doorstep again a few weeks later, wheedling me with stolen roses and come-to-bed eyes, telling me that I was the only one he’d ever really loved—well, I just couldn’t resist him. I made it clear that I’d never trust him again, but strangely that didn’t seem to worry him in the slightest.
He had moved out of the house with Miyuki (“Been thrown out, more likely,” Sam said) and was staying with another “friend” until he “found his feet” (“Tell him that they’re on the ends of his legs,” suggested Sam wheezily). I immediately realised that he was angling to move in with me, and to my boundless relief, I stayed strong enough to refuse permission. If it hadn’t been for the memory of him and Miyuki rolling around in the park, Vinnie would have had his misplaced feet planted firmly underneath my table—at least that was something for which to be thankful. We contented ourselves with frequent sex and no questions asked. When I thought too deeply about it, it broke my heart, but I was too busy with New World and Sam to allow myself to take it too seriously.
By spring of the following year, I felt established enough at New World to risk taking a week off. I had spotted nine HELENA LET ME TELL LONDON MY SONG bumper stickers on my way home from the show that morning, plus I’d just had a very complimentary review in the media section of The Independent. Sam wasn’t getting better, but she was no worse either, and we both really needed some sun and a change of scenery.
“Come on, then,” I said to her on the phone. “Pack your bikini, we’re off on vacation. I’ll drive down and collect you on Wednesday morning. Be ready by ten.”
At ten-thirty the following Wednesday, Sam and I were heading back up to Heathrow Airport to catch an afternoon flight to Santorini. My car was full of things to maximize Sam’s comfort: cushions to support her bony ass on the plane; a borrowed hospital wheelchair to help conserve her limited energy; enough medication to start a small pharmacy; her own feather pillows. I wondered how she had suddenly managed to turn into an invalid, and it made my throat swell with sorrow.
It was a beautiful April day, and we decided to take the scenic route to the airport. Being on tour, all those years of bleak American highways, always made me so thirsty for the English countryside. I drank in every bright yellow acre of rape, the green of the patchwork fields, the arches of tree branches overhanging the smooth arrow-straight roads.
Sam was uncharacteristically quiet for most of the drive. At one point she switched on the radio, tuning it to Radio One just as the DJ announced, “Next up, that classic song that stormed the charts six years ago—seems like only yesterday—the fabulous Blue Idea, with ‘Take Me Away’ …” I laughed and cringed a little as the synth intro started up, joined by my bass and then Justin’s high-pitched voice, as familiar as my own skin.
“Turn it off, turn it off!” I cried. “Radio One is banned from this car!”
Sam refused. “Don’t be a spoilsport! You know New World doesn’t reach out to the sticks.” She cracked a smile for the first time that day. “It’s funny, but I still get such a thrill when I hear you on the radio or see you on TV—even after all these years, I still want to yell out to everyone, ‘Hey, that’s my best friend!’ ”
And even after all those years, I was still pleased.
After a couple of miles speeding along a deserted Roman road, littered with the tiny corpses of squirrel, pheasant, and rabbit, the Blue Idea song finished and was replaced by a dreary interview with a techno band. I clicked off the radio again and slid my Ann Peebles CD into the CD player, to listen to the title track: “I Can’t Stand the Rain.” I was humbled by how far superior that song was to ours: her creamy vocals, the pounding rhythm, and the passion of the incredible Memphis Horns. It made “Take Me Away” sound like a weedy little preprogrammed tune on a cheap Bontempi organ. Sex versus impotence. Scotch on the rocks versus orange squash through a straw.
I sang along, but Sam was silent again. I sensed something brewing in her, and waited for her to tell me about it.
We barreled through yet another tiny picturesque village, this one with a quirky little square church tower peeping over the rooftops, pinnacles on only three of its four top corners.
Sam finally spoke. “There’s something I need to tell you.”
She turned down the volume on the CD.
“I thought so. What is it?”
There was a brief pause over the top of the muted Memphis Horns.
“I didn’t say anything to you before, but I saw my specialist at the hospital yesterday. My lungs aren’t ever going to get better on their own. In fact, they’re packing up. He says I’m going to need a lung transplant.”
I got a funny swimmy feeling in my head and had to grip the steering wheel hard. All I could think of to say was, “When?”
“Whenever I decide to go on the waiting list, and then as soon as they find a donor. That could be three days or three years.”
The swimmy feeling turned into a sick feeling. “One lung or two?” I asked, as if I were at some surreal organ-donors’ tea party.
Sam laughed, catching my thought, but she had tears in her eyes. “Just one should do the trick.”
I didn’t want to ask—but I couldn’t not ask. “What are the success rates like for this … kind of thing?”
“If you mean what are my chances, the survival rate is about forty percent in the first year.”
This figure whirled around my brain for a while in a useless way, not sticking anywhere, like the algebraic formulas we had to do in school. I didn’t understand what it meant, and that time I didn’t ask. It didn’t sound at all promising to me.
“But do you have to do it?” I was almost pleading.
“No, not immediately. But I should do it before I get too weak to cope with the operation. If I don’t have it done eventually, I will probably die.”
She sounded so calm, but also slightly numb, as if it hadn’t sunk in yet. Her last statement shocked me even more—I knew it wasn’t good, but I hadn’t realized her health had gotten that bad. I suppose I hadn’t wanted to realize.
We were out of the village, but suddenly the countryside looked drab and uninteresting. I pulled the car into a lay-by, buried my face in my hands, and burst into tears.
“Oh, don’t, please,” Sam said, “you’ll start me off.”
But she didn’t cry. She stroked my shoulder as if it was my life under threat, and then pulled out a packet of fruit Polos, offering me one. “Go on, it’s red, your favorite.”
I took the Polo but I couldn’t look at her. It was too painful to think that something might go wrong and I’d never see her again. The sharp sweetness of
the Polo hit the back of my tongue, and I clung to the taste as if someone had thrown it to me, a mini red life belt.
I tried hard to think of what I’d learned over the years, in my various flirtations with different sorts of spirituality: Christianity, Buddhism, Transcendental Meditation—they all said the same thing, that the soul was eternal, and death of the body meant nothing, not in the grand scheme of things. But not Sam’s body! Sam’s body had Sam inside it!
Cars whizzed intermittently past us in a whining crescendo of painted metal and engine noise, the wake of their momentum making my BMW rock slightly.
Sam leaned her head on my shoulder. “Listen, Helena, I’m not going to go on the list just yet. I’m going to think about it for a while and then decide. In the meantime I really want to enjoy this holiday, okay?”
“Okay.” I blew my nose and after a minute we drove off again. I still felt stunned but I tried to be optimistic, to look at it as a piece of good news.
“Just think what you’ll be able to do with a new lung—run, swim, shop. It’ll change your life totally. I’ll make you get up early with me and help me with the show—in fact, why don’t you come and live in my house with me?”
“I hate getting up early. And thanks for the offer, but there’s no way I’m moving in with you if Vinnie’s still on the scene,” said Sam grumpily, taking advantage of my vulnerability.
“Then he’s history, definitely this time. I would happily never see him again, for you to be better, and close by. Oh God, Sam, it would be so wonderful to have you back to your old self.”
Sam sighed. “What is my old self? I really can’t remember.”
It was late that evening when we finally got settled in our apartment in Santorini, which was basically a luxuriously furnished cave, carved from the side of the cliff. Even in the dusk we could tell that it was utterly beautiful, but it was also probably the world’s most un-wheelchair-friendly place. There was a short but very windy walk up steps and round corners from the road to the apartment, so I left Sam and her wheelchair waiting in the car while I puffed up and down the path with all our stuff. When I’d finished I was sweating like a cart horse, and worried that it might finish me off altogether to have to give Sam a piggyback, but thankfully she was able to walk unassisted. She collapsed peakily on one of the beds as soon as we made it through the door.
“Why didn’t you rent an apartment that we needed to abseil down to? At least that might have been less tiring to reach.”
She wasn’t cross, just being sarky, but I still felt stricken.
“I’m sorry, Sam, really. The brochure made out that it was just by the road. I had no idea.”
“Oh, don’t worry. It’s just nice to be here. Let’s sleep on it, so I’ve got the energy to face some retsina and sunshine tomorrow.”
We did very little that holiday, except lie on our begonia-bright terrace, gawping at the stunning view around the dramatic horseshoe-shaped cliffs and over the black volcanic island. Sunset was our favorite time. We sat companionably in our deck chairs in the charged silence, as the massive sky before us changed into every outlandish shade of red we could imagine. The volcano got blacker, the clouds pinker, and finally the sun slunk down in a blaze of orange into the dark Aegean waters of the caldera. It was so far away from everything: perfidious boyfriends, the sound of my voice echoing out of cafés and cabs and offices all across London, scarred lungs. To both of our delight, Sam felt better that week than she had for a long time.
“It’s all the negative ions in the air from the volcano,” I informed her one evening when we were out for a “walk” (I was pushing Sam in her wheelchair). “Apparently the health benefits are well documented. It says so in the guidebook.”
“Wish we could stay for longer,” she said wistfully as I propelled her chair with difficulty up the steep and ill-kept road, struggling womanfully until we got to the brow of the hill.
“Me, too. But I tell you what: Healthy, it might be; flat, it ain’t,” I puffed, before deciding that perhaps we shouldn’t go down the other side, as I might not be able to control the speed of our descent.
I laughed out loud as something occurred to me. “Hey, Sam, this reminds me of the Great Continental Quilt Bob-Sleigh Race—you know, heaving like mad to get into position, then losing all control on the corners and down the stairs—we nearly killed ourselves!”
“Oh God, yes! I used to be so terrified when you were dragging the quilt, but I couldn’t get enough of it. Hey, how about a quick turn down the hill now? I’ll sit on your lap in the chair!”
I started protesting, horrified at the thought, until I saw she was laughing. I gave her a friendly slap on the shoulder, and we looked out at the beautiful view of the sun shimmering across the flat turquoise sea instead, an act much more befitting our age and status.
Later that evening, both of us glowing pink from the day’s sunshine, we were polishing off a bottle of retsina and flicking olive stones off the balcony wall in the hopes of starting our own cliffside olive grove.
“We need more wine, and some music.” I jumped up and ran to fetch a CD and a fresh bottle. “I want to hear Ann Peebles again.”
I came back out with my Discman, setting it on the wall next to us and inserting the CD. The introduction to “I Can’t Stand the Rain” quivered, somewhat more tinnily than from my deluxe car stereo, out of the tiny little Discman speakers, filling the ionized air around us.
“John Lennon thought this was one of the greatest songs ever,” I started to say, but about halfway through the sentence, my voice stuck and unexpected tears flooded my eyes.
“What’s the matter?” Sam asked with alarm.
I shook my head and gesticulated at the Discman. I found that I had just proved my own theory of music and memory. “I forgot we’d been listening to this song when you told me about your lung transplant.”
I knew at that point that forever more when I heard Willie Mitchell’s orchestrated drum “raindrops” at the start of that song, I would relive the feeling of driving through a Hampshire village with the trees in bud, and Sam telling me that she had to have a life-threatening operation.
We sat listening to the track in silence, holding hands, me dripping tears all over the begonias. It was such an instinctive reaction: “I Can’t Stand the Rain” equaled tears.
Eventually Sam opened the new bottle of retsina. “Come on, get some more of this down you. Let’s enjoy life while we can, eh? Nobody else can do it for us. It’s too short to waste.”
I nodded, held out my glass, and swiped my hand over my face.
“I tell you what, Helena,” she added. “You don’t half cry a lot, for an international pop star.” She grinned at me.
I gulped down half the contents of my glass. I wasn’t sure whether I was quite ready to be teased or not, but the strong bite of the retsina reassured me that perhaps I was.
“Hey, you know me.” I managed to grin back. “Some people have weak bladders; I have weak tear ducts. It’s a quirk of nature, that’s all. Top me up again, would you?”
Sam obliged, and this time we clinked glasses in a toast.
“To enjoying life.”
My other enduring memory from Santorini came on a day when Sam had been feeling a little tired and had decided not to venture off our terrace. I had set off alone, to find a swimming spot I’d heard about right at the bottom of the cliffs at the highest point of the island.
I wound my way down three-hundred-odd shallow and uneven steps, overtaken constantly by knock-kneed donkeys bowing under the weight of lazy tourists, to sea level, past a neat little seafront bar and round a corner. Here the path petered out, and I had to clamber over heaps of jagged rocks to a small secluded place where a group of locals and a few tourists in the know were sunbathing and diving off a selection of bigger, flatter rocks.
About twenty feet out into the sea was a tiny, tiny island—less an island, really, than one huge stone jutting out of the water. Perched on the side of it facin
g the volcano was a stone shrine, simple but beautiful in the way that rural Greek architecture always was, merely an arch with a bell, a small altar, and steps leading from a crude stone mooring place. I thought it was a shrine to the Virgin Mary, but I couldn’t clearly remember.
What I did recall, though, was swimming out alone round the island to where the sea suddenly became deeper than I could possibly have imagined. This was where the volcano had blown out the center of the main island, sometime during the second millennium B.C. When I dived down even a few feet, the water became much, much colder and darker, and it frightened me. Suddenly I experienced a sensation of unutterable loneliness. It was as though I could feel the sadness of Santorini’s Bronze Age inhabitants as what they must surely have dreaded came to pass: In a vast evil plume of molten lava their beautiful civilization was buried, frozen forever in time. What was not blown up or covered in many feet of pumice was flooded out by the sea, which had rushed in to fill up the vacuum left by the subsequent collapse of the volcano’s magma chamber.
In the silence of the water’s depth I felt the grief of a lost people, perhaps even the mighty Atlantean race; this could conceivably have been the furthest Western tip of Atlantis. The air was so vibrant there that anything seemed possible.
But being under the water was too frightening, too much like death, and I shot back up to the surface to where I could once more hear my breath and feel the hot sun warm my chilled face. Seagulls wheeled reassuringly around my head, and I de-misted and replaced my goggles before turning to swim back to the shore, unable to shake the feeling that something might grab at my legs from the ineffable depths. As I’d struck out for the rocks at a brisk crawl, my face alternately in the water and to the side for air, something caught my attention and I stopped. Just ahead of me a sharp ray of sun had pierced the water’s surface and was shooting down through the blackness, lighting it like a laser beam. I put my face back down in the sea and stared at it underwater.