The Singer

by Cathi Unsworth

  ‘So, yeah. After we staggered back from the States, we had to mek that album. Tony Stevens somehow managed to banish Sylvana off premises – well, for a week, anyway. And it were all going so well. Steve smashed his guitar to pieces and stormed off in a mood. Lynton just disappeared into the night, as he so often did in them days. And then it were just me and him.

  ‘So that’s when I told him what he’d done. I described what it looked like in graphic detail, how I’d felt when I was waiting for the ambulance. And how her parents had had to put her in a sanatorium to get her off the heroin habit he’d given her, hide her away in a place where no one they knew could see what had happened to her. How he had basically, totally ruined her life.

  ‘And he listened to this all with this scornful expression on his face, like I were a raving madman mekking this all up. Then he said, “You know what your problem is, Kevin? You’re too soft you are.

  ‘You’re fucking joking.’

  ‘I’m not, Eddie. That’s when I lost it. God, it must have looked funny. Like a Yorkshire terrier trying to pick a fight with a Doberman or summat. And the rest, as they say, is history.’

  ‘Jesus Christ.’ I was at a loss as to what to say now.

  ‘Not really the story you were looking for, is it?’

  Well, that put it in a nutshell. ‘No. No it isn’t.’ I took a long swig of my beer. ‘So what is Rachel doing now?’

  ‘Not a lot. She’s still in and out of sanatorium all the time. She has her good days, when she goes back to her parents’ house, walks out on moors, draws a little bit. Then it all gets too much for her and they have to tek her away again. It’s not a life, not really. So you see now why I had to protect her. If you really want to do her a kindness, you’d not publish any of this. You’d just tek it on board and think about whether you really do want to find him again.’

  Those words followed me out of Stoke Newington, through the grey miasma of the long road home. Followed me back up to the flat and hung in the air around me.

  It was horrible, and it seemed to be getting worse.

  The trouble was, the more horrible it became, the more I wanted to write it. The mystery was gaining a new momentum, and where I had been dispirited a few days ago, now I was seized by the conviction that what I was discovering was increasing in importance. I knew what I had to do next.

  I had to go after Donna.

  26

  The Art of Falling Apart

  January 1981

  As Tony lifted the glass to his lips, Steve noticed that his hands were shaking. Eleven o’clock in the morning and he’s got the DTs, he thought. Reminds me of my Da.

  He’d never seen his boss look so rough before. Hollow cheeked, blurry-eyed, not just unshaven but with a plaster over his top lip where his unsteady hands had obviously done battle with a razor. Steve wondered if he’d asked him down to this pub because he daren’t show his face at work looking such a fright.

  Vince had been gone for a week now. And what a week that had been.

  ‘So you’ve finally heard from him then?’ Tony drained his whisky down in one, lit a cigarette with his fumbling fingers.

  ‘Aye,’ Steve winced. Of all people, he’d expected Tony to be the strong one. But the chaos that had erupted when the clock struck twelve on New Year’s Eve seemed to have turned everyone he knew into a walking disaster.

  As far as Steve could make out, it had all gone wrong at the point during the party when he’d had to leave Donna to go off for a slash. Up until then, he had been thoroughly enjoying himself, tucking into Tony’s hospitality, pretty sure he’d be getting his oats before the evening was out.

  He’d had a wander on his way back, looked around the place a bit. Old habits die hard, and Steve’s fingers still gave a little prickle as he opened bedroom doors and cast his eyes over antique furniture and fine porcelain. Stevens’s brass had gone a lot further than any other record company boss he’d known. Far beyond old Don, that was for sure. And to think he’d once considered Dawson the musical Don Corleone.

  All this, he was sure, was not merely the result of a few successful records. This was how Steve imagined the landed gentry lived.

  His perusal came to an abrupt end when he opened one door and found a mass of writhing bodies on the bed, some of whom, he gradually worked out, were the members of a suddenly famous punk-turned-pop band. They appeared to be enjoying both heterosexual and homosexual favours all at the same time, though it was quite hard to tell what was female from what was male. Steve had never seen so many naked bodies contorted into so many ludicrous positions all in one place, never heard such moaning and groaning.

  ‘Can any one join in?’ he finally asked, as no one seemed to be paying him any mind.

  The eyes of the most famous member of the ensemble immediately snapped open. He looked a picture, he really did, framed between the young girl bucking away on the end of his cock and the pair of dangling, hairy bollocks suspended over his forehead.

  ‘Who left the fucking door unlocked?’ the pop star screeched and a few seconds of highly amusing squealing and scrabbling later, Steve found a Victorian chamber pot hurtling towards his head. He only just dodged it in time, hearing it smash to pieces on the closing door.

  Downstairs, people had started to count down the New Year. Steve followed the source of the sound, realising he’d lost his drink somewhere on the way.

  Donna was not where he’d left her, but neither was anyone else. They’d all congregated around the staircase and the hall, leaving unattended bottles and glasses all over. Steve took one look at the throng and decided to minesweep for a while rather than fight his way through. He found a half-full bottle of Bollinger and an empty glass and sauntered in the opposite direction, looking for the master bedroom. He wanted to see how Tony Baloney really lived.

  Up on the top floor, another gaggle were clustered around the steps leading up to the roof, where the sound of shrieking laughter indicated yet more inhibitions being lost. Steve walked past, strolled the length of the landing and back, casually turning door handles as he did, ready to say he was looking for the khazi if anyone asked him. But the door to every room up here was locked.

  Ah well, Steve thought, at least he’s not stupid.

  He stopped by the sash window on the landing to put down his drink and roll up a fag. That done, he pushed up the bottom of the window and leaned out onto the sill, staring over Tony’s back garden. It was even more like The Godfather out there. White fairy lights had been strung up in the pine trees, illuminating a gravel patio full of Roman statues, all nudes and nymphs, arranged tastefully around clipped privet hedges. Oh aye, thought Steve, bet he comes out here for his orgies in the summer time and all.

  No sooner had that image had flashed through his mind than a sight appeared below him that made the roll-up drop from between his lips.

  The door was flung open, casting an orange light onto the scene. Tumbling out came Tony, wrestling a wildly flailing Donna.

  He put her in a headlock while he slammed the door behind them, then tried to drag her up the path away from the house while she pulled backwards, her heels thrashing on the gravel.

  ‘Get off me, you fucking queer!’ she shrieked, pummelling him with her fists.

  Tony managed to drag her around the back of one of his topiaries, so that no one looking from the back door could see them. Then he grabbed hold of a huge handful of her hair, pulling her head back and forcing her down on her knees. ‘You’ve really gone and done it now,’ he said, his voice quiet but ominous with menace. ‘All I done for you, girl, and this is how it ends up?’

  Donna panted and writhed in his grasp, her eyes flashing with defiance even as her teeth gritted with pain.

  ‘Fucking homo queer,’ she yelped.

  ‘Why, thank you, darling,’ Tony’s face twisted into a snarl, ‘I’ll see you live to regret that remark’ Then he started pulling her again, away under the branches of a tree, away from Steve’s sight.

  Stev
e started legging it downstairs, pushing his way through the throng. As he reached the main stairway, he could see people hurrying into their coats, hear snatches of conversation about a fight and the cops coming.

  But all he could think about was Donna being dragged across that garden. Just the way his Da used to drag him off for a hiding. He skidded into the kitchen, ready to punch Tony Stevens through the nearest wall.

  And saw Lynton trying to get up off the floor, a vaguely familiar woman with short, spiky hair helping him, pressing an ice pack to his forehead.

  ‘What the fuck?’

  ‘It was Donna,’ said the woman. ‘She just went mad. She came down here screaming her head off and punched him clean out.’

  Steve’s gob fell open.

  ‘Ambulance on its way,’ someone shouted behind him.

  Lynton was shaking his hands, wobbling around on unsteady legs.

  ‘I don’t need no ambulance, man,’ he groaned.

  ‘Oh, fucking hell’ Steve just managed to catch him as he pitched forward out of the woman’s arms. ‘Lerrus get clear, can you?’ he shouted at the gawping moon faces pressed around him. ‘Lemme get him somewhere he can lie down.’

  ‘I’ll take his legs,’ the woman said. She was the only person in the room who seemed capable of rational thought. Together they got him into one of the lounges, hoisted him onto a sofa, scattering pissed liggers like confetti as they went.

  After that, the woman disappeared and ambulance men appeared in her place. They flashed a pen torch into Lynton’s eyes, put a neck brace round him and lifted him onto a stretcher.

  ‘It’s probably only concussion,’ one of them said to Steve. ‘But let’s get him out of here, eh?’

  There was a lot of screaming going on in the hallway as Steve followed them out, a mélée of bodies hustling for the exit. For a second he caught sight of the woman who had helped him, red-faced and animated in argument; then of Tony’s face in the kitchen doorway, white as a ghost as his party dissolved around him.

  The back of an ambulance seemed like a quiet place of sanity after that.

  They took Lynton to hospital because he’d hit his head as he’d fallen on the floor and they needed to be sure he hadn’t fractured his skull. It was dawn before they discharged him, with a huge headache and a lump on his jaw the size of a duck’s egg. Steve called them a mini-cab from the numbers pinned up around the payphone in reception. He’d been drinking the vilest coffee he’d ever tasted from the vending machine for three hours by then. As they staggered into the freezing cold beginning of 1981, Steve felt like the most sober man alive.

  Lynton crashed out as soon as they got home, but Steve couldn’t rest. There was something wrong with the house too. No one was in it. There was a strange, nasty smell lingering on the air.

  It suddenly occurred to him that he hadn’t seen Vince at the party. Nor Rachel. Nor Kevin. And there was no sign of any of them here either. Every room was deserted. In the kitchen, there was a huge burn in the carpet, the source of the noxious odour.

  He remembered Rachel moving the iron back and forth, back and forth, and a horrible feeling of impending doom settled in Steve’s stomach. But the ironing board had been packed away, the iron itself standing cold on the sideboard.

  He was sitting on the stairs, still trying to puzzle out what the fuck had gone on, when Kevin came through the front door at midday.

  ‘What the fuck...?’ Steve began.

  Behind his wire-rimmed specs, Kevin was hollow-eyed with exhaustion.

  ‘Don’t ask,’ he said, and went to walk past him up the stairs.

  ‘Kevin?’ Steve caught his arm.

  Kevin shook his head. He looked like he’d been crying. ‘I’ll tell you later, Stevie. I can’t think straight any more. I’m going to bed.’

  Steve dropped his arm and put his head in his hands. He must have dozed off for a while, perched on the stairs like that, but then Steve always had the ability to set like concrete when he went to sleep. The next thing he knew was Kevin tapping him on the elbow with a mug of steaming tea, saying: ‘Thought you might like this.’

  ‘Ow!’ Steve came back to consciousness with a nasty crick in his neck, wondering for a moment where on earth he actually was.

  ‘What? Oh, er, thanks, Kevin.’ The aroma of the brew woke his stomach before his brain was fully engaged. ‘Fucking hell, I’m starving!’

  ‘I were just about to put cooker on,’ said Kevin. ‘We’ve not got much in, mind. Will a fry-up do you?’

  ‘Sounds fucking great.’ Steve stood up and stretched, feeling his elbows and knees crack as he did so. He followed Kevin into the kitchen.

  ‘What time is it?’ he asked. It was dark again outside, but that was no indication at this time of the year.

  ‘Four o’clock,’ said Kevin, lighting the gas ring. ‘I tried to have bit of kip, but I couldn’t really settle. Thought maybe a full stomach might help. It must be nearly twenty-four hours since I last had owt.’

  ‘So,’ Steve attempted to connect events in his head, fuzzy though it was. ‘What happened to you last night then, Kevin? Did you not manage to make it up to Party of the Year?’

  Kevin carefully laid out four rashers of bacon in the middle of the pan, watched them start to sizzle.

  ‘No’ he said. ‘There was a bit of a to-do in here when you left’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well.’ Now he was slicing the two remaining button mushrooms they had in the fridge as finely as he could manage. ‘Vince and Rachel had a bit of a falling out. An argument, you might say, about going to that party. He went off on his own and left her here…’

  ‘Oh,’ Steve nodded, ‘I gerrit. So you had to mop up the tears.’

  ‘Something like that.’

  ‘Bad luck, son. Where is she now, like?’

  ‘Well,’ Kevin carefully flipped the rashers over, scattered his mushrooms into the pan. ‘That’s just it. She’s not here any more. She’s left him.’

  ‘Right,’ Steve said and yawned. ‘Well, I suppose that’s no great surprise, is it? I wouldn’t have put up with him half as long as she did. Suppose it’s always at this time of year everything comes to a head. Gone home to her mam then, has she?’

  ‘That’s right’ nodded Kevin, carefully cracking an egg into a cereal bowl, tipping it in the pan, then doing a second one the same way.

  ‘Oh! Steve noted his technique. ‘That’s a good idea, Kevin. You don’t break the yolks that way, do yer?’

  ‘No,’ said Kevin as he pulled open the door of the cupboard above his head, stood there for a moment with his back to Steve, examining what was in there. His voice sounded a little wobbly for a moment when he said: ‘Oh, great, there’s still some beans in here. Do you want some, Stevie?’

  ‘Oh aye, and chuck us a bit of fried bread in there if there is any.’ His stomach was rumbling by now at the smell of the bacon. ‘Thanks, Kevin’

  ‘That’s all right’ Kevin’s voice was back to normal. He pushed the rashers and the mushrooms to one side, laid down two slices of bread in the middle of the pan to soak up the fat. ‘So did you see Vince at this party then?’

  ‘No,’ remembered Steve with some surprise. ‘No, I didn’t. D’you know what, I don’t think he even got there. Maybes he’d been invited somewhere else; somewhere he didn’t want us to find out about. I was gonna say somewhere more posh, but believe me, Kevin, I don’t think there is anywhere more posh than Tony Bloody Stevens’s gaff. Apart from Buck House, mebbe. No, it has to be another woman, doesn’t it? Christ. I don’t know what they all see in him.’

  ‘Me neither,’ Kevin nodded, flipping the bread over and then taking a tin-opener to the beans. ‘Nearly done now, Stevie. Do you want to put kettle on, mek us another brew to go with it?’

  ‘Aye,’ Steve pushed himself off the corner of the doorframe where he’d been leaning, walked over to the sink. Looked down as he was filling the kettle and noticed the burn in the carpet again.

 
; ‘Aye,’ he said, motioning at it with his head, ‘were that part of argument an’ all?’

  Kevin nodded.

  Steve whistled. ‘All’s I can say is, good job it weren’t round Tony Baloney’s. There would have been fucking hell to pay’ He plugged the full kettle back into the wall, turned it on at the switch.

  Kevin took a couple of plates from the rack by the sink. ‘I’ll just put these under grill for a moment, heat them up,’ he said.

  ‘Your mam did train you well, didn’t she?’ Steve laughed.

  ‘Aye,’ Kevin shrugged concession. ‘I suppose she did. Oooh heck, Stevie, I completely forgot – where’s Lynton got to? I’ve not made him any.’

  Steve raised his eyebrows. ‘Now there is another story.’

  ‘Oh yeah?’ Kevin had taken everything out of the frying pan and arranged it on their plates. There was a loud gushing sizzle as he tipped the beans into the hot pan.

  ‘Poor old Lynton got his head brayed in last night. By a lass.’

  ‘You what?’ Kevin spun round with a look of amazement on his face.

  ‘Oh aye.’ Steve poured boiling water into the teapot. ‘Some lass went a bit mental and lamped him one. I don’t actually know why. I had to end up tekkin’ poor sod to hospital, we were in there most of night. Some party, eh?’

  ‘Oh God’ said Kevin, turning pale. ‘What hospital were that, Stevie?’

  Steve put the teapot down on the table. ‘Fucked if I know. I just called us a taxi when they let him out. I didn’t really tek much in, tell you truth. And after all that, he just wanted to sleep it off. He’s probably so full of sedative he’ll be out for rest of day.’

  ‘Right,’ said Kevin in a tiny voice, turning the gas off under the beans and piling them onto the plates.