The Singer

by Cathi Unsworth

  ‘Just deserts?’ quipped Granger drily, and everyone laughed.

  ‘Seriously,’ Stevens looked at both of us with a twinkle in his eye. ‘Get someone else to dish the dirt on that one. I don’t really want to talk about her. I might have the most successful band in the world on my roster – but she lost me the best one.’

  ‘Fair play,’ Granger shrugged and the subject was dropped. I didn’t mind one bit. Stevens’s reaction to her after all this time was fascinating enough; I couldn’t wait to fill in the gaps elsewhere.

  I waited till after dessert and cheeses, for the haze of brandies and cigars, before asking probably the trickiest question of all: ‘What do you reckon happened to Vincent?’

  Stevens’s eyes followed the smoke upwards and he smiled sadly. ‘I change my mind about that on a frequent basis,’ he admitted. ‘Sometimes I think he must have took a vow of silence with some dodgy monks somewhere and they’re still keeping him prisoner. That’s the only way of explaining how someone as noticeable as he was has stayed AWOL so long. ’Cos, I don’t know about you,’ he nodded at Gavin, ‘but the Vincent Smith I knew wouldn’t just walk away from everything and go and be some old goat herder in Tibet or something.’

  Gavin agreed. ‘Can’t see that myself either. He wasn’t exactly cut out for manual work.’

  ‘Or mucking in with the locals, fading into the background,’ Stevens nodded. ‘Nah, but that’s a fantasy really, a distraction from thinking about the fact he’s almost certainly dead.’

  Gavin looked down at the tablecloth, as if those words were a bit too strong for him to take, and muttered: ‘Yeah. I came to the same conclusion myself.’

  Stevens puffed on his cigar. ‘You can’t trust the police to find out anything,’ he said evenly, still looking at Gavin. ‘And foreign ones, forget it. So I did hire a sort of a private eye myself to try and find out what happened in Paris.’

  ‘You did?’ Gavin looked amazed.

  ‘Yeah,’ Stevens blew a long plume of smoke up to the ceiling. ‘After about three months, when it became obvious he wasn’t suddenly going to turn up on the doorstep again. Course, the trail was long cold by then. Found out fuck all. Vincent and the lovely Sylvana were surrounded by dealers and junkies while they lived in Montmartre, and you know how they all melt away when the cock crows. You can’t find out anything of substance from people like that.’

  ‘Is he still around, this private eye?’ I blurted, and Stevens blinked at me, totally amused.

  I thought I’d said a stupid thing and he was going to laugh in my face, but instead he said kindly: ‘I might be able to dig him out for you if you’re really interested. If he’s still alive and even remembers it. But I could show you his report and you’d be none the wiser.’

  ‘I just want to get a feel,’ I explained, ‘of what it was like there in Paris, just of what it felt like at the time, before he…went up in smoke.’

  Stevens nodded. ‘I understand that. Give me your number and I’ll get back to you.’

  He still sounded genuine when I played back the tape. I was soon to realise that that lunch had been something of an initiation ceremony for me. Stevens already knew and trusted Gavin, but if he hadn’t liked me, I don’t think that anyone would have talked. After we’d gone our separate ways that day, with Stevens footing the entire bill, Gavin started to get the calls.

  Lynton Powell was first. He rang Gavin to say he could meet us in a month, after he had finished the production on his latest album, which he needed to do in Los Angeles. Which was lucky, because that was where Steve Mullin was still hanging out with the metal boys, and he would put in a word for us while he was out there.

  A few days after that, Kevin Holme agreed to meet. Of all of Blood Truth, he was the one who had always said the least. Some of the articles I had in my archive scarcely even mentioned him, and Mick Greer’s only seemed to point out the amount of abuse he’d got off his fellow band members. So I was determined to let him have the say that no one else had ever allowed him. Hoped that would get him to open up, get me the inside line.

  As it happened, on the day we were due to meet Kevin, Gavin got a commission from the Sunday Times and had to jet off somewhere, so I ended up going it alone. At first, I was a bit wary of how it would pan out without Gavin making the introductions, whether it would be so easy to get the instant rapport we had with Tony Stevens.

  But going it alone, it seemed afterwards, was a stroke of luck.

  Kevin had asked us to meet him in his local, the Red Lion, off Stoke Newington Church Street. It was a cavernous old ginhouse that slumped across the corner of the road, decked with garish banners offering various lager promotions, big screen football fixtures and dubious claims about being the ‘home of live music’. The list of upcoming attractions was a veritable Who’s You? of pub-rock dinosaurs and tribute bands, mirroring a clientele of aged hippies, wizened roadies and threadbare one-hit wonders, who basked around the fruit machines in the lounge bar and looked up sullenly as I walked in for my one o’clock meeting.

  They all looked as dull and hungover as the day was outside, and for a moment I felt an overwhelming anxiety that I wouldn’t recognise Kevin Holme amid the lined faces and faded tattoos that sat there with their roll-ups hanging from their thin lips, yellowed fingers clawed around their flat pints of bitter.

  But Kevin had chosen this venue because, he said, he was friends with the landlord and could get us a private room upstairs. I remembered I was supposed to ask at the bar for him and did so with relief.

  The only bar staff around was a slight teenager with long, dyed black hair and a bolt piercing through his eyebrow. He looked like most of his flock probably had the last time they were famous, in around 1984. Again, I had that weird sense that time was going backwards and made a mental note that this had to come through in the writing. The London of the rock community like some kind of Swiss cheese, riddled with wormholes in time.

  Bar goth perked up when I asked him if I could find Kevin Holme anywhere. ‘Ah yih,’ he said in the Kiwi accent that was now de rigueur of London barmen. ‘Go upstairs, mate, and turn to your lift,’ he pointed round the corner of the bar. ‘He’s in the function room. You can’t muss ut.’

  ‘Great,’ I smiled. ‘Can I get a pint of Four X to take with me? And d’you know what Kevin likes drinking?’

  ‘Don’t worry about that, he’s swit,’ the pasty youth told me. ‘Kivin only drunks muneral water, eh.’

  I clocked his Sisters of Mercy badge as he poured my pint and thought to ask him: ‘Do you like his band, Blood Truth?’

  He frowned. ‘Nuver heard of ’um, mate. I jist thought he was a sussion guy.’

  ‘Ah,’ I handed over a fiver. ‘You should check them out. I think you might like them somehow.’

  I left him scratching his head and wondering.

  The function room was obviously where they had the bands. Thickly carpeted and smelling vaguely of stale biscuits, it was a drab little hole, where I imagined the not-even-hopefuls of the bar downstairs went through the motions, dreaming of days gone by.

  Kevin Holme was perched on a barstool, leaning against the deserted counter, reading a paper and sipping his fizzy water thoughtfully. He was shorter than I’d imagined, and still wearing the sort of thing he always had on in his press shots – black leather jacket, black jeans, pointy boots and a white shirt with purple stripes. A small pair of wire glasses rested on the top of his nose, and he still sported a bit of a mullet, though the face, when he looked up, was thankfully less battle-scarred than the undead downstairs.

  He looked like a middle-aged pixie.

  ‘Hello,’ I put my pint down and extended my hand to him. ‘Eddie Bracknell.’

  ‘All right, Eddie,’ Kevin said. He sounded like a pixie too, or Willie Carson. He looked over my shoulder as he spoke, and his hand felt small, dry and delicate, not what you’d expect from a drummer.

  ‘Gavin not with you then?’

  ‘No, I’m afraid h
e had to go on a shoot at the last minute. In New York. I hope you don’t mind him not being here.’

  ‘Not at all,’ Kevin looked almost relieved and ushered me onto the nearest barstool. As I rummaged my dictaphone out of my bag, he carefully folded up his paper and said: ‘Gavin was Vince’s friend, really. He took some good pictures of us, but we didn’t talk much.’

  He sounded quite sad and suddenly I felt sorry for him. He looked so easy to pick on.

  ‘Is it all right to turn this on?’ I asked, placing the dictaphone between us.

  ‘Yeah, sure,’ Kevin looked like he hadn’t seen one of those in a long time, if ever. ‘It’s a bit strange, somebody wanting to talk to me about Blood Truth. After all this time. It feels a bit like a different world.’

  ‘I’ve read a lot about the band,’ I told him, ‘but there never seems to be very much about you.’

  ‘Well, there wouldn’t be, would there?’ he laughed to himself softly. ‘Do you mind if I ask you, why are you doing this book?’

  ‘It’s Gavin’s fault,’ I shrugged. ‘He played me a video of one of your gigs. That was enough to get me hooked. Then, the more I found out about the band, the more I thought, God, here’s a story that needs to be told. It’s amazing that people have forgotten about you.’

  Kevin nodded thoughtfully, then looked me straight in the eye. ‘You’re not going to try and find Vince, are you?’

  I barked out an unconvincing laugh. ‘Well, I’d obviously like to try and find out what happened to him…’

  Kevin was shaking his head.

  ‘I don’t think you could,’ he said. ‘Or, maybe I don’t think you should. He’s better off lost…’ he blinked and almost whispered, ‘and forgotten.’

  Then he seemed to shake himself out of it. ‘Look, sorry, Eddie, this isn’t a very good beginning. I don’t mind answering your questions, but I think I should be honest with you about one thing, ’cos no one else will. They’ll all idolise him and lionise him, the way your friend Gavin does. But take it from one who was actually there and actually sober – Vince Smith was a very bad bastard. Right from the start…’

  Then Kevin Holme started to tell me his sad, bad tale.

  9

  The Last Gang in Town

  August 1977

  Stevie was having a nightmare about cheese. He was in a desert of melting cheddar, surrounded by big holey mountains of edam, all of it going rank and sweaty in the relentless heat. He was trying to move but his feet were stuck in bubbling gunge and the smell of it all was unbearable. ‘Uughhh!’ He shook himself awake, but the hideous smell still lingered.

  And no wonder. A long pair of feet, encased in filthy, sweaty socks was propped right under his nose. They protruded from the end of his bedcovers, from where they joined a long, angular ridge under the sheets that led right along to a shock of black, greasy hair spilling out of the bedstead. Bleary from sleep as he struggled up to his elbows, Stevie tried to remember how he’d ended up in bed with Sid Vicious.

  The events of the night before came back in a rush as he stumbled out of the twisted sheets, his T-shirt, Y-fronts and socks clinging to his clammy skin. Oh aye, he thought, my new friend Vince. Stevie went over to inspect him.

  ‘Uughhh,’ he repeated, examining the congealed gash on sleeping beauty’s forehead, the great clumps of blood stuck in his already matted black hair.

  The room smelled worse than a docker’s drawers, so Steve staggered to the window, pulled back his blackout curtains and, wincing in the bright light of 10 a.m., pushed the sash window up and open.

  He leaned out to breathe in the fresh air, take in the panorama of the rooftops stretching towards the big refineries on the docks. The bains were already at their football in the street below, racing up and down the street with their big orange ball.

  Another beautiful day, he noted with some poignancy. Summer holidays were almost over now. No more days spent practising in Lynton’s garage. No more nights humping gear.

  He had a flashback to Steve Jones in his underpants and his face cracked into a wild grin. Now, that – that had been a moment in a lifetime.

  ‘Nurrrghhhhh,’ came a sound from the bed. Underneath the black hair, something stirred.

  ‘Nurrrghhhh, am I?’ it seemed to say.

  ‘You’re in Hull, mate,’ replied Stevie.

  ‘In Hell?’ Vince Smith emerged from the covers, eyes screwed up against the sunlight. ‘How did I get here?’

  ‘You stowed a lift in our van, remember?’ Stevie watched with some amusement as his companion tried to focus.

  ‘Can we have a bit less daylight?’ frowning Vince asked. He sounded much posher than he had the night before.

  ‘Why, does it turn you to dust?’ quipped Stevie, thinking, aye, and he doesn’t half look like a vampire and all.

  Vince put his hand to his forehead and instantly recoiled. ‘Ow! Jesus, what have you done to me?’

  ‘I’ve not done owt,’ Stevie shrugged. ‘Sid Vicious did that to you. You were right pleased with it at the time.’

  A sudden grin lit up Vince’s face. ‘Sid! Oh yeah, I remember – I communed with him!’

  ‘He cut your head open with his bass,’ Stevie nodded. ‘Do you feel all right? S’pose I should have took you to the hospital. But it were hard enough stopping Terry and Barry from throwing you out of van.’

  ‘Ah, it’s all coming back,’ Vince began shakily to stumble to his feet, one hand clutching the bedpost, the other gingerly examining his skull. ‘Shit, you saved my life last night. And I don’t even remember your name.’

  ‘It’s Stevie. Stevie Mullin. And I didn’t really save your life – unless you count stopping Barry from givin’ you a batterin’.’

  ‘Stevie,’ Vince extended his hand, the one with the eyeball ring, took Stevie’s and shook it with a strength that belied his skinny frame. ‘Believe me, you did save my life. You got me away from Rachel for the night. If she’d seen state of this…’ He eyeballed himself in the mirror on Stevie’s wardrobe.

  ‘I won’t ask,’ mumbled Stevie. ‘D’you want to get cleaned up? Then we’d best get out of here. The old man’s due back off boats today and if he finds you in here, he’ll think I’ve gone queer. Believe me, no one will be able to save your life then.’

  Vince started to laugh, sending stars shooting through his eyeballs. He clutched his wounded skull, muttering: ‘Maybe I’m dead already.’

  Stevie hung round the top of the stairs nervously while Vince was in the bathroom. Downstairs the telly was on full blast and he could hear little Gracie and his youngest brother Milo laughing to The Banana Splits. His mum was hoovering and the smell of breakfast bacon still lingered on the air. Stevie was starving but he couldn’t risk it. Getting Vince in in the middle of the night was one thing. Smuggling him back out unnoticed would be a whole lot harder and the thought of his dad barging in on them sharing a bed was already causing his stomach to turn somersaults.

  ‘Hurry up, hurry up,’ he muttered nervously to the locked bathroom door, his fingers drumming on the banisters. Vince was taking ages. Stevie himself had pulled on new underwear, last night’s peg leg trousers and a white T-shirt, fluorescent yellow socks and his brothel creepers. He’d rubbed some of the toothpaste he kept to do his hair with around his teeth, sprayed on some deodorant and figured he could save a bath for later. But obviously, when sober, Vince was a little more fussy about his appearance.

  The bains outside smashed their football against the front door, causing the dog to erupt. Stevie thought he was going to have a heart attack.

  ‘Will you shut up!’ his mother yelled, turning off the hoover.

  For one second there was silence in the Mullin home, and that was the moment Vince pushed open the bathroom door, and stood framed in the doorway in all his splendour. His hair stood up on end again and the skin all red and shiny around the two-inch scab that was forming on the centre of his forehead. His T-shirt was ripped and covered in dried blood. On his left shoulder,
Stevie hadn’t noticed the night before, was a tattoo of a naked lady sitting in a cocktail glass. On his right shoulder was the Virgin Mary.

  If Stevie’s dad saw that…

  ‘Is that you up, son?’ Mrs Mullin’s voice came.

  ‘Uh-oh, yeah, Ma,’ Stevie winced. ‘Top of the morning.’

  ‘D’you want something cooking?’

  Stevie and Vince stared wide-eyed at each other across the top of the stairs.

  ‘You’re all right, Ma, I’m late as it is. I’ll get summat out.’

  ‘Late for what?’ Stevie’s mum appeared in the hallway, looking up at him in puzzlement, one hand around the dog’s collar, the other still trailing the Hoover lead. ‘I thought you were working last night?’

  Vince shrank back into the bathroom. Stevie dropped his gaze just in time.

  ‘For band practice, Ma. We’ve not got many days left now.’

  ‘Well, it’s not like you not to want your breakfast.’

  She eyeballed him suspiciously.

  ‘I know, but it’s ’cos I had a late night,’ Stevie said the first thing that came into his head. ‘I’ve slept in and now I’m gonna be late. Don’t worry, Ma, I’ll be all right.’

  She shook her head. ‘Well I don’t know.’ She shrugged, and made to turn away. ‘All right, son, I’ve got enough on my plate as it is. Your dad’ll be home any minute and I’m not halfway through the cleaning. You carry on. Go on and have a good time.’

  Her voice resounded with sarcasm, but Stevie didn’t rise to it. Instead he smiled sweetly. ‘All right then, Ma, see you later.’

  She scowled at him and disappeared from view, turned the Hoover back on. It was now or never.

  Stevie threw Vince’s leather jacket at him. ‘Come on!’ he hissed. ‘Let’s get out of here!’

  They ran down the stairs, shot out of the front door before Stevie’s mum could finish asking: ‘Stevie? Have you got someone with…’ and were halfway down Hessle Road before they stopped running and started laughing.