The Singer

by Cathi Unsworth

  It wasn’t the sort of club she’d ever been to before. It was a private members club, hidden up an alleyway besides St Martin in the Fields in Trafalgar Square, the sort of place you’d never find again if you didn’t have someone to show you. It was on about three floors, with old panelled walls hung with sporting prints, tanks full of tropical fish, shaded lamps and heavy leather furniture. Tone had told her it was the place he came to when he wanted to truly be away from everyone in the business.

  At first, she had thought the reason he was taking her there was to seduce her, away from prying eyes. But after they had got there, and they’d settled into their armchairs with huge balloons of brandy brought to them by a waiter, he’d put a business proposition to her instead.

  He really liked her, he told her, really admired her guts. He hadn’t seen any other woman operate with half the nous that she had, coming out of nowhere and wanting to make something of herself so fast. He especially liked the way she handled people, he’d said with a knowing wink, young people – she’d got their measure all right. He liked the band she wanted to sign as well, and he wanted to help her out, but he didn’t want other people to know that.

  ‘Why?’ Donna had asked, totally confused by him.

  He’d leaned forward in his chair and smiled. ‘’Cos you’re like me, Donna. We come from the same place. I didn’t have any sisters, but if I had done, I would have wanted them to be like you.’

  Donna had frowned. ‘I still don’t get it. You don’t really know me, why would I be like your sister?’

  Tone had put his huge right hand over her delicate left one and looked deep into her eyes. ‘I know you, Donna.’

  Then he’d looked up at the waiter, the handsome young waiter, who’d been hovering close by all the time they’d been talking, made a slight motion with his head. The waiter came over immediately with two fresh balloons and Donna saw Tone palm something into his hand and wink as he placed the glasses down. She watched Tone watch him walk away and suddenly everything fell into place.

  ‘We all have our secrets,’ he said. ‘Keep ’em close, Sis, trust no one and you’ll do just fine.’ He lifted his drink to her. ‘Here endeth the first lesson. Cheers.’

  Tone had been a silent partner in Vada ever since. In fact, the name had been one of his jokes, one that Donna didn’t even get – she just thought it sounded cool. He’d given her the initial investment she needed and taught her a lot about business and in return, she had provided a glamorous companion when he needed to be seen with one – at events and socials where members of his family or their associates would be present.

  The one thing – the only thing – Tone was scared of was his dad finding out about his ‘peculiarities’. So Donna’s double life as his stunt girlfriend was carried out far away from the eyes of their music biz friends. No one knew about his stake in Vada, not even Ray. They kept their working life as distant as possible, rarely attending each other’s gigs, being merely polite when they did meet on the scene.

  They both enjoyed the duplicity.

  So Donna was quite surprised when, having told him that she needed to see him, he suggested that she came up to his offices after work. She’d rarely been there before and he knew she hated going to that part of town.

  ‘Get a taxi, Sis, I’ll pay for it,’ he insisted. ‘There won’t be no one around, except the night watchman to let you in. I’ve just got a few things that are gonna keep me back tonight, but if you don’t mind hanging about, I’ll take you up the club later for a bite to eat.’

  He meant the club off Trafalgar Square. He knew how much she loved it there, how much she thrived on exclusivity.

  Donna clomped up the stairs to his office at about eight-thirty that evening.

  The old boy on the door had told her to go up to the second floor and turn right. On the way up, she’d peered in at the office on the first floor. The lights had all been turned off, but the room was still partially illuminated by the streetlights shining through the bay windows from the street below. It was a cramped arrangement of desks and filing cabinets, decorated largely with flyposters of various Exile album releases and the odd spider plant, the picture of organised chaos, held in suspended animation now that the phones and typewriters were all silent for the night.

  She carried on up the stairs, following a pool of light that spilled out from under an open doorway. She could hear the sound of laughter.

  Funny, Donna thought. He said there wasn’t going to be no one here. She reached the open door to Tone’s office and stood hesitantly behind it for a moment, not sure if this was really where she was supposed to be. Then she shook herself out of it, stepped over the threshold.

  Tone was sitting behind his desk, a wide smile all over his face. A cigar burned in his ashtray and a bottle of Glenfiddich whisky was open on the desk before him, a cut-glass tumbler of the pale amber liquid in his hand.

  He looked up: ‘Ah, there she is. Donna, you haven’t met Vince, have you?’

  Donna turned her head slowly to the right. Sprawled out on the two-seater sofa opposite Tone in decadent glory, was the most beautiful man she had ever seen.

  He must have been six foot four, a long, spider’s frame, encased in black Sta-Prest trousers, a black open-necked shirt and winklepicker boots that went on for ever. A silver cross hung round his neck, a belt with an enormous buckle snaked round his hips and his crowning glory was a shiny black quiff that was maybe four inches high and spiked in all directions. He peered over the top of his gold and black shades, a pair of violet blue eyes that really shouldn’t belong on a boy, sizing her up in one long, lustful glance from head to toe.

  Donna felt rooted to the spot, not a sensation she was at all used to. She had once thought Dave Vanian was the epitome of male beauty. But compared to this he was an alley cat looking at a panther.

  ‘Hello, Donna.’ The apparition stood up, put his glass of whisky down on the coffee table, and extended a hand that was as adorned with thick silver rings as her own. His voice was deep, with a trace of a northern accent.

  ‘Hello, Vince.’ Donna took the hand, feeling suddenly wildly out of control.

  He smiled louchely. ‘Shouldn’t we have met before?’

  ‘Donna’s got her own label,’ said Tone from behind them. ‘She’s the first businesswoman of punk.’

  ‘Well,’ said Vince, coolly raising one eyebrow, ‘I’m impressed.’

  He dropped her hand gently and motioned for her to sit down next to him.

  ‘Vince here is the singer from Blood Truth, as you probably know,’ said Tone, reaching into the cabinet by his desk for another glass. ‘We just had a few details to sort out before these guys go back on the road.’

  ‘You heard our new album?’ Vince asked her.

  To her inner fury, Donna seemed tongue-tied. ‘N-no,’ she heard herself gibber.

  ‘Tut tut, Anthony,’ said Vince, standing up. ‘Can I give her one? If she’s the first businesswoman of punk then I think she’d better hear it.’

  ‘Go ahead,’ Tone blithely waved his hand towards the shelves.

  Vince picked out an album and passed it over.

  The shiny, just-pressed cover had on it a picture of Vince and three other men, sat around a table in what looked like a Wild West bar, with a bottle of bourbon in front of them and four empty glasses. Dimly lit with a woozy green filter, it had been taken with one of those fish-eye lenses so that it gave you the feeling of drunkenness. Vince sat in the middle of the table, wearing a cowboy hat and a white T-shirt. To his right was another guy in a different kind of hat, who closely resembled Gene Hackman. To his left was a black guy with a hostile look in his eye and a cigarette burning between his raised fingers; and to the black guy’s left was a nondescript little fella with spiky hair, a paisley shirt and round glasses.

  Above them was written in a semi-circle in a typeface that was supposed to resemble a long lasso: Blood Truth. Below, in larger, more swirling, yellow letters that mirrored the above arc
: From the Bottom of the Glass.

  ‘Can you see the concept there?’ said Vince, smiling. ‘Or is concept a dirty word to you?’

  Luckily, Tone intervened with a glass of whisky for her at that moment before her jaw dropped completely open. It was as if her brain couldn’t keep up with the sudden rush of blood from her heart; some kind of blind instinct she had never felt before was rendering her not just speechless but truly dumb and she didn’t know whether to slap the bloke or kiss him.

  ‘Thanks, Tone,’ she said, as coolly as possible, taking the glass in one hand while continuing to examine the record in her right, desperately trying to claw back her composure.

  ‘I think so,’ she returned to Vince’s question. ‘You’ve got the cowboy, the copper out of The French Connection and the black guy…I don’t know what that other one is, but the rest of you, are you doing a tribute to the Village People?’

  Tone laughed. ‘No flies on you, hey, Sis,’ he joked.

  She waited for some stinging reply from Vince, but he simply took off his shades and pointed at her. ‘We want you,’ he bellowed, ‘we want you as a new recruit!’

  Then he picked up his own glass of whisky and downed it in one, put his glass down on the table and shrugged on a long leather coat that had been lying over the arm of the sofa.

  ‘Anthony,’ he put an arm around his boss’s neck, ‘I’m off. Thanks for the chat.’

  ‘Any time,’ Tone slapped him round the back heartily, making a show of male bravado. But Donna noticed the colour rising around the collar of his shirt where Vince’s arm rested, noticed his pupils dilate the way they did around certain handsome young men.

  Oh shit, she realised. This isn’t just business. But they can’t be…Not the way that Vince just looked at me…

  As if reading her mind, Vince disentangled himself and gave a graceful bow to her. As he did, his eyes met hers again over the top of his shades, that same wolverine look that matched precisely how she was feeling inside.

  ‘Nice to meet you, First Lady,’ he said. ‘I hope you find time to enjoy our disco classic.’

  And with that, he was gone.

  She wasn’t mistaken. For a second, Tone’s eyes followed Vince out of the door, for a second they looked wistful, almost sad. Only for a second though. The next he was clapping his hands together, saying: ‘Right then, Sis, let’s get out of here. I don’t know about you, but I’m Hank Marvin. I’ll just get all my bits together…’ He hefted up a leather briefcase onto his desk, put some files into it and snapped it shut, chattering away while he did so.

  Donna let him get on with it, her mind still reeling. All she could see was Vince and the way his vivid eyes had bored into her. She had wanted nothing so much as…

  ‘Now then, how much was that cab you got here?’ Tone pulled out a money clip from his trouser pocket, peeled off a fiver. ‘Will this do it?’ he flashed it under her nose.

  ‘Uh?’ Donna looked up from the carpet, startled.

  Luckily, Tone misread the situation completely. ‘You are worried, ain’t you, girl?’ He put a paternal arm around her. ‘We’ll get a cab down there and then you can tell me all about it…’

  ‘Thanks, Tone,’ Donna smiled up at him, thinking, tell you about what?

  Suddenly Sylvana was the last thing on her mind.

  19

  New Dawn Fades

  February 2002

  I didn’t stir from my half of Granger’s pit until about five in the evening, another day gone by and dark again already.

  Expecting carnage in the front room, I found instead Gavin and Steve sipping tea and reading the papers like a couple of old dears, Richard and Judy on TV in the background.

  ‘Fookin’ ’ell, Boswell,’ Steve greeted me. ‘You look rough as arseholes.’

  ‘G’day, mate, do you want something to eat?’ asked Gavin.

  I stared at them in disbelief. Why was it only me who suffered the next day? Was I carrying the burden of their sins upon their livers and waistlines around with my own?

  ‘Yeah, ’cos me and Digger fancy steppin’ out for a bit in a while,’ Steve carried on. ‘See if he can show me somewhere decent to sup this time.’

  The very thought of drinking any more alcohol made me want to heave. ‘Er, could I just have an orange juice, please,’ I pleaded feebly. ‘And have you got any Nurofen?’

  I eventually staggered out of there at seven, by which time I had finished off half a packet of digestive biscuits in an attempt to not feel quite so sick, and drunk about three pints of orange juice. As I left Gavin and Steve on the corner of Ladbroke Grove and Lancaster Road for the tube, the old punk rockers were still highly amused at my inability to keep up with them.

  ‘You sure you’ll not just have one?’ Steve said, peering suspiciously at me. ‘It’s Friday night, you know.’

  ‘Yeah, I realise, but the missus…’ I began.

  ‘Ah,’ Steve rubbed the side of his nose. ‘That old chestnut. Say no more, Boswell, me old son. Say no more.’

  And chortling to themselves, they bade me goodnight.

  I don’t know what the rest of the day had been like, but the freezing cold wait for the tube put paid to yesterday’s fantasies about the arrival of spring. Huddled up with only a copy of the Guardian for cover on a bench on the station platform I felt even more like a geriatric old git. The pain in my kidneys was all too real, while my head felt like it was stuffed with cotton wool and my mouth thick with yesterday’s smoke.

  When I finally arrived back in Camden it was eight o’clock and the place was crawling with jabbering freaks doing drug business outside the tube; Italian goths on their way to the Dev; and a swarm of children dressed in sportswear buzzing the wrong way up the roads and all over the pavements on their undersize bikes.

  ‘Jesus!’ I exclaimed as one veered away only inches from me on the pavement by Sainsbury’s, then screamed a torrent of abuse at me to ‘Watch where you’re fuckin’ goin’, you wanker!’

  And Steve thought the Portobello had taken a turn for the worse. I’d have to invite him over sometime. I’d like to see his methods in action up here.

  Imagining the bike-riding hood rat sailing through a plate-glass window cheered me on and into Ali’s shop, where I picked up another packet of digestives and a huge bottle of Lucozade. Mother’s standbys were still the best at a time like this.

  In fact, I was almost whistling as I turned the key in the lock, thinking about the enjoyable televisual tat of Never Mind The Buzzcocks and Friday Night With Jonathan Ross to come.

  It’s funny, those almost absurdly mundane moments you have like that, which come just before your world falls apart and linger around to taunt you long afterwards. As if to say, yeah, and that’s all you cared about, wasn’t it?

  From the moment I walked through the door, my hopes of a recuperative Friday night in front of the box with my health food were dashed.

  Louise was standing in the front room, talking to someone on her mobile. Her coat was draped over her arm like she was just about to go out. At her feet was a packed suitcase.

  ‘I’ll see you later,’ I heard her say, cutting the connection as she saw me.

  ‘What the…’ I started.

  ‘What do you think?’ She cut me off, eyes glinting like slits of hard emerald. ‘I’ve had enough, Eddie. It’s started all over again with you, hasn’t it? I suppose you’re about to tell me you just had to have one more to get the story you needed, aren’t you? That’s why it’s eight o’clock at night and you’ve only just turned up from an interview you supposedly did yesterday lunchtime. Why don’t you tell me the truth for once in your life? That you’d rather hang out with a load of deadbeat old men than me. You can’t, can you?’

  ‘But I…’ I was flabbergasted with the severity of this assault.

  ‘No buts, Eddie. You said this book was an attempt to get us out of this place. No, Eddie, it’s not. It’s just another excuse for you to spend your whole life getting pissed and hanging o
ut with your fellow adult babies.’

  ‘That’s not true, Louise! Listen to me…’

  ‘No!’ she snapped, her voice resounding through my aching head like a claxon. ‘You listen to me for once. I am going to be thirty years old this year and all I do is work, work, work, while you just sit around on your arse. Most people have settled by my age. Most people have a place of their own and a husband they can rely on. What have I got? A rented flat smack bang in the middle of Crack Central and a boyfriend who’s spent his entire life trying to avoid any form of real work. If I keep on listening to you, I’m going to end up a dried-up old maid with nothing to show for myself, while you are going to end up in the terminal ward of a hospital for alcoholics. So I’ve decided. I need to get away from here and do some serious thinking, because from how it looks from here, you and me don’t have a future.’

  As I tried to take in the scale of her ranting, a car horn sounded outside. ‘That will be my cab now,’ she informed me, peering out of the window to make sure.

  ‘But where are you going?’ My voice came out a pathetic whine. I could feel childish tears springing into my eyes like a just-slapped infant.

  ‘I’ll call you in a week’s time,’ she said. ‘If you happen to be in, maybe we can talk then. If you don’t, you can forget all about me and you. Now get out of my way.’

  And with that, she flung on her coat, shoved her mobile in her pocket, lifted her suitcase and slammed out of the door, running down the stairs.

  I was too shocked to even try and stop her. ‘Louise…’ I whispered to the air where she’d just been.

  I moved to the window in time to see her get into a black cab. The driver did a U-turn up Camden Road and headed away southwards, while my vision blurred into his red tail lights.

  I’d really fucking done it this time. The biscuits and the Lucozade dropped out of my hands as I crumpled onto the sofa. I’d really fucking done it.