by Anna Maxted
“What mistakes?” she shrills. “They must have been extremely silly for this to happen!”
I tell my mother about Mel and the Sun piece.
She gasps, “Not Tony’s Mel?”
“Yes,” I hiss through my teeth, “Tony’s Mel.”
Sheila Miller picks up her napkin and throws it down, again, on to her chocolate mousse—a sign of how upset she is as she considers it shocking manners not to clear your plate and has been known to reproach offenders with the words “Didn’t your mother teach you anything?!”
When she replies, her voice is hushed (the Cancer Voice, I call it). “Oh, Natalie, how could you? How thoughtless, how exceedingly thoughtless. I can’t believe you could be so thoughtless. So embarrassing for Mel! And for—”
As my mother says the name Tony for, at a conservative estimate, the billionth time in six minutes, I feel a sharp tear rip across my chest, as surely as if a part of me has broken. Before I know what I’ve done, the liver and onions and mash are sliding down the magnolia wall and I am screaming so loudly that the neighbors won’t have to bother to fetch a glass.
“Why is it always always about Tony? I’m sick of it! Tony this! Tony that! He’s so bloody wonderful and I’m such an abject failure”—it annoys me that even when I lose my temper I use words like abject—“Well, I tell you what, he’s not so wonderful, Mother, why don’t you get your precious Tony to tell you about his secret bloody daughter he’s kept a bloody secret for eleven bloody years, get him to tell you about that, oh I love it, so bloody perfect he picks the perfect bloody woman, doesn’t he, a well-adjusted, sweet-natured girl, in frigging Australia, could she be any more convenient, sends him a picture once a year, doesn’t harass him for money, oh no, he gets to bury his mistakes, live his perfect fucking hedonistic life, drive the car, so successful, so bloody—”
“Natalie,” interrupts my mother in a low voice. At the sound of it my mouth snaps shut like a pair of castanets, reality hits with the force of a speeding juggernaut, and I stare at her in terror. My mother is a big barrel of a woman, but at this moment she looks tiny in a giant world—a little chump, sitting in front of a mess of mash and onions slithering down the magnolia wall.
“Hand on my heart,” she continues in the same expressionless tone, “I have never been ashamed of you in my entire life. But today, right now, I’m sorry to say that I am.”
12
IT’S LIKE COMPLAINING OF A STOMACHACHE AND being diagnosed with a baby alien. You might sense a twinge but you have no understanding of the rampant ugliness inside you. I don’t hear myself until I stop talking, and then I can’t believe such filth came out of my mouth. I feel invaded and half expect a green claw to burst from my belly button. Who put it there? She can’t believe it either. We remain frozen, staring warily at each other like two cats gauging whether to leap into fight. (If we had tails, they’d be swishing.) I don’t dare move, until my mother drops her gaze to the tablecloth and says numbly, “I probably need to clear up.”
I turn and run.
What have I done. What have I done. It’s her fault, though. I hate liver. I sit in traffic and the driver behind me hoots because the lights are green and I didn’t accelerate from 0 to 60 on amber. I give him the finger, then worry that he’ll leap from his Nissan Micra and attack me with a crowbar. Mind you, he’d be doing me a favor—Tony probably wouldn’t shout so loud if I was in intensive care. I feel like I’ve swallowed a volcano. I fumble with the door, lean over, and retch onto the road. I’m sweaty and shaking. Which would I prefer: serious head injuries or my brother’s rage? Brain damage, of course, there’s no contest.
The phone shrieks as I walk into my flat and I want to rip it out of the wall. Right now I could do with an alien—he could make himself useful and zap me into space. It occurs to me that if I were Paws, I wouldn’t have to deal with any of this. My existence would be an endless picnic of farts, naps, and being fussed over. Dreaming about life as a basset hound—Gucci accessories and being wrenched from your family at six weeks—I lift the receiver to my ear like a gun.
“Princess,” says Chris.
I just about weep with relief and croak, “Hi.”
He sniffs. Then, in staccato bursts, he says, “You and me. Sunday. Three-thirty. My pad. Be there.”
It’s like talking to an AK-47, which, in my present condition, is a pleasure. I want to tell him what I’ve done but I can’t. He’s not interested. (My dilemma: I’m attracted to Chris because he’s wild, yet I want him to care about the bumfluff of my life. And these twin desires come from my brain?) It’s nothing to Chris that my mother is ashamed of me. My mother is ashamed of me. Oh god. Sometimes you suspect it, but to actually know. The ugly feeling is back, heavy in my gut. It’s her fault. I drift into the bedroom and lie stiffly on my bed until the phone rings again. It’s like waiting for a train when you’re late for work and tied to the track.
“Hello?” I falter.
“You stupid little girl,” says my brother—mild words but his tone is scathing—“I can’t believe you did that.” His voice starts off quiet and grows louder and louder. I cringe as he yodels on. His complaint—which if I exclude the swearing is brief—is that I have complicated things. It’s true. Tony’s life is as straightforward as a Topsy & Tim book. I’ve turned it into War and Peace.
Because this was never about morality. (I know I said I was square but, please, I’m not Dr. Laura.) I never thought it an outrage that Tony has a daughter from a passing affair, because the woman he had the affair with was so happy to have the baby. (Indeed, Tony running back to Britain was probably a bonus for her.) On the irresponsibility scale he’s a 2, compared with some. Frannie has seen one guy impregnate—or rather seen the results of one guy impregnating—five different women in one year. My brother’s fatherhood is not a scandalous secret, despite what the neighbors in Hendon will say.
It is, though, a situation he has preferred to ignore, because family involvement is vastly inconvenient. One reason my brother is so successful is that he has a borderline schizophrenic talent for dividing his life into separate compartments. Things get in the way otherwise.
“Tony, I’m so so sorry,” I whisper.
“Do you fuckin’ know what this means?” he yells in my ear.
I nod. While Tony seems to indulge our mother’s obsession with his every move—not that tough, as he enjoys talking about himself—he’s only ever let her skim the surface. While dispensing informatory snacks at a generous rate (Mum, don’t tell anyone, but so-and-so refused to land at Luton airport because Luton isn’t very rock-’n’-roll…Mum, you shoulda seen it, this unsigned band hired a topless double decker, did it up like a set, played outside Black Moon till they got moved on by a traffic warden), Tony keeps the gourmet facts back. He’s in marketing. As if he’s honestly going to say what he thinks. My mother scrapes at the hard shell of his private life like a mole digging at granite.
“This,” he shrieks, “is the tip of a great big fat granny iceberg invading all our lives!” He never spoke a truer word. I nod dumbly at the phone. The granny iceberg is now adrift and its hulking destructive might is floating this way, crushing all resistance in its path. Tony didn’t want any of this. Since our father eloped to L.A., Tony has been his own man. He plays the dutiful attentive son and brother, yet he keeps his distance. He’s never asked me if I want a line. Despite the chat, Tony keeps to himself. That’s how he operates. I only know about Kelly and Tara because he rambled out the tale one Christmas when he was as mashed as the parsnip puree. Secretly, I’d love to meet them. I’ve always been fascinated by Tony’s secret family. First, I thought a secret family was glamorous (you grow up in Hendon, you get your kicks where you can), and second, I think we’d get on. Kelly is an artist, and she sounds great—sensible, but fun—and Tara sounds like a nut. In annual letter number five, Kelly wrote that when Tara grew up she wanted to be a Hoover. Tony told me this while in a cocaine haze, and sniggered, “Just like her dad.”
>
He showed me a photo, and I thought, how can he not want to see this little mouse, with brown skin, white-blond hair, and bright blue eyes, her father’s eyes. My niece. I think of Tara and I know that until Tony surrenders every last detail of the pair of them—including their preferred breakfast cereal and Kelly’s mother’s maiden name—our mother will be at him like a Fury fighting over handbags at the Harrods sale. And that’s just the beginning. My brother’s time is up and it is my fault.
“She’ll have ’em over here, living in Hendon!” he bawls. “My bloody soul will be public property!”
While this is blatant artistic license for Tony, who—as far as I am aware—doesn’t possess a soul, I know what he means.
“Are you sure?” I quaver. “I mean, swapping Bondi beach for…for Blockbuster Video, they might not—”
Tony screeches, “Mum’s on her way here! I’m going to New York tomorrow morning! This is going to be endless! It is going to be no end of hassle! It’ll be like fuckin’ EastEnders!”
This, I fear, is not an exaggeration. I try very hard not to cry, and succeed. “I tell you one thing,” he growls. “That berk you hang around with, his shite band, they are so over! Bands come and go, and his are gone! Tell him this from me, darlin’—you can’t polish a turd!”
He slams down the phone so hard my eardrum nearly ruptures. I pull at my hair—three hairs, I think without feeling. I want to call my mother and make it better but I can’t. She’s on her way to Tony, anyhow—the scourge of other road users, driving her blue Metro at the pace of a wheelbarrow, bolt upright, nose an inch from the windscreen, both hands gripping the wheel at ten to two. She’ll have done her makeup before leaving the house. No one puts on lipstick like my mother does. She applies it once, blots it with a tissue, and applies it again. Then she sticks a finger in her mouth and pulls it out smartly with a pop. “Otherwise you get red on your teeth, dear, and that’s vulgar,” she explained once.
I think of her long-suffering powdery face, lined with years of worry and watching Murder She Wrote, and I feel ashamed. It isn’t her fault. None of it. The ugly feeling shrivels, and a custardy dollop of guilt settles in its place. She has always meant well, yet I wanted to hurt her. I did, but I hurt myself more. In a bolt of lunacy, I believed I could prise Tony off his pedestal. Like some priggish Victorian, repelling her with dastardly tales of illegitimacy and shame! Instead, I’ve fueled her oedipal obsession. And shown myself to be small-minded and pea-brained to boot. I’m the forgotten godmother trying to scupper Sleeping Beauty’s marriage prospects. My mum is ashamed of me.
But the guilt can’t wash away the injustice of it all. I admit I brought it upon myself, but I can’t help thinking, I’m in disgrace, why is Tony untarnishable? I’m not the one who, when River Phoenix died, sent an e-mail to half of London that read “fucking lightweight.” I’m not the one who escaped jail because a sniffer dog checking a large black Beamer at Reading Festival got confused by a bag of cheese buns on the backseat. I’m not the one who discarded a pregnant woman like a bag of old cabbage because she was “inconvenient.” And yet my mother is ashamed of me. I wait in for her to call. At eleven, I ring her. I ring again at midnight. No answer. I realize that she is screening her calls. The idea is absurd. My mother worships the phone. Its shrill ring means that someone—even a pervert conducting a lingerie survey—needs her. I call her on Saturday morning at 7:30 A.M. No answer. I bite my lip. There are three levels of rage: screaming rage, spitting rage, and silent rage. Silent rage is an advanced method of psychological torture. I know Tony gave her the KGB Training Manual for her birthday. I didn’t think she’d read it.
I call Tony on his mobile. No answer. I even call Mel, no answer. I feel as if I’ve been punched in the stomach fifty times. I suck it in. It aches. I press it. Ouch! It must be psychosomatic. Wow. I’m impressed, that’s serious. But I suppose losing your job and becoming an outcast is serious. Possibly for the same reason, my legs have seized up. I can barely hobble. I ignore the pain, and I spend the weekend pounding the treadmill like a hamster. I run until my kneecaps grate. It takes my mind off things. On Sunday morning I see Alex—she bounds through the gym as I sweat on the StairMaster. She clutches her head and makes an I Can’t Believe It’s Not Pilates face, but doesn’t come over. I’m glad. I’m so awkward in my skin I feel like a robot masquerading as me. I can’t fit a normal expression on my face, and small talk is a hazard—I’m terrified I’ll short-circuit and say something odd.
On Sunday afternoon I drive over to Chris, who reveals that he has an appointment with an A&R manager at Black Moon tomorrow at 10 A.M. and would I like to bunk work and come along. He won’t say how he got it, but I suspect it involved lying.
“That’s brilliant, Chris,” I say.
He grins. “Yeah, I’m made up, me.”
I try to smile but it won’t happen.
“What?”
“I…I’m a little surprised, that’s all.” I sigh.
He takes huge offense, so, as I lack the strength to improvise, I tell him the truth: I’ve accidentally alienated Tony, who has sworn vengeance with, alas, express reference to Blue Fiend. (I have the sense to leave out his comment about polishing.) Chris stares at me as if I’ve just shouted, “Michael Bolton is the best solo artist in the world!”
“Don’t worry,” I stammer, “I’m sure Tony didn’t mean it. He doesn’t hold grudges.”
Chris looks frantic and blurts that during the ballet, my brother said that the A&R manager at Black Moon was “not your typical A&R,” and Chris decided Tony was suggesting he make an appointment. That, and the magic words, “We supported the Manics,” secured Chris a meeting. Now what? What if they get talking in the lift and Tony slags the band?
“Look,” I say, trying to stay calm. “Tony is in New York, he’ll probably be there for a few days, so you’re all right. And I don’t think any Black Moon boys were at the gig, so it’ll be fine.”
Chris scowls. “No thanks to you.”
And while I think, Au contraire, all thanks to me, I keep this to myself, and agree to meet him in the reception of Black Moon at 9:45 A.M. tomorrow. I’m shunned by my family and barred from work, what else am I going to do?
“Princess,” says Chris, who is perched stiffly on the silver Philippe Starck chaise longue trying to look relaxed. He is wearing a burgundy leather jacket, a Che Guevara shirt, and dark blue jeans.
“Hi,” I say, nodding at the pretty receptionists and trying not to stare at their phenomenal bosoms, “I’m with him.”
We spend the next thirty-five minutes staring at framed covers of Dazed and Confused and flicking through this week’s New Musical Express, until a pale, etiolated creature with slicked back hair and a metal spike through his ear appears, and croaks, “Ben Buckroyd.”
He holds a hand out to Chris, and his eyes flicker over me. We are halfway up the oak stairs when Chris says, “Er, Ben, no offense, mate, but, uh, I thought my meeting was with a geezer called Jon.”
Ben rakes a hand through his hair. “Jon’s tied up,” he rasps. Chris glances at me. Ben leads us into his office with a flourish. It smells like a stale ashtray and is the size of a broom cupboard, which means that Ben is a talent scout—the lowest of the low, with as much sway as a tree in a box.
Ben plops himself behind a small, cluttered desk, gestures for us to be seated in two orange plastic chairs, then swings up his legs and sticks his feet in our faces. There is gum stuck to the soles of his Nikes. My foot kicks against something, which turns out to be a box of demo tapes. I look around and count eleven boxes crammed with cassettes and CDs.
“So you know Tony Miller?” says Ben. “Shaggin’ his sister, are ya?” Chris pales and smiles weakly at me. Ben looks at me too, a small pellet of understanding fires in his brain, he coughs, and says hurriedly, “Let’s hear it.”
Chris hands Ben the CD, he sticks it in a monster stereo, and presses Play. We are aurally mugged by the Blue Fiend classic “Lend Me Your Ears
.” Chris dances in his seat (I’m reminded of Rain Man). While it would show solidarity to jerk my chin back and forth, I don’t want to look as stupid as I feel. I know the first few seconds of the track are important, so I scrutinize Ben’s face. Chris is staring at him like a rabbit at an oncoming car. Ben inspects his fingernails. Then he reaches out—time seems to ease into slow motion—and flicks to the next track. Chris looks stricken but bravely taps his foot to “Bitch Out of Hell.”
“Sounds a bit ropey,” growls Ben. “Where did you record it?”
Chris knows the question is a courtesy and mumbles his answer. I sit there, mute and useless. I feel as small and silly as a wool jumper in a boil wash. Ben zaps through four tracks. He progresses from “I’m not getting it” to “Yer singer sounds like a drain.”
I hunch miserably and gaze at the many photographs on the wall of minor pop acts and Ben, larging it. Finally Ben snaps off the sound. He rocks back on his chair, rests his hands behind his head, and husks, “Most people buy three albums a year—Celine Dion, Simply Red, and Travis. Which shows dodgy judgment. Even so, they ain’t gonna buy this!”
Chris locates his voice box. “If you met the guys you—”
“Sorry, mate. Between you and me, we don’t have an active signing policy at the moment. I’m A&Ring two important bands, they’re in the studio.”
Ben removes his feet from the desk as a good-bye gesture.
“Thank you for your time,” I say as we kowtow out of his cupboard.
“All fuckin’ four seconds of it!” spits Chris as he stomps into the street. “I’m going home! Black Moon Records are crap!” Stomp stomp. Another burst, “The rude bastard! He wouldn’t know talent if it shagged him up the arse!” On which delectable thought, we part company.
I walk toward Camden tube and try to feel Chris’s pain. It’s like trying to feel Saddam Hussein’s pain. The—admittedly eighties but—inescapable thought, You were in there as a dolly bird! thunders around my blond head and I don’t like it. My heart bops with the realization. I don’t like it! I am…I test the daring thought on the tip of my brain…displeased with Chris. I feel foolish. I had no business in that broom cupboard, Blue Fiend is nothing to do with me, I was dragged along as an ornament. “Well, he’s got poor taste in arm candy,” I growl as I turn the key in the lock.