“Yeah. Someone to look after you. Keep you on the straight and narrow. Make sure you don’t end up taking anything you shouldn’t.” He chuckled. “Tucking you up in bed at night. What do you think?”
“I think you’ve actually lost your mind.”
“Hey, there’s no shame in it, you know. Plenty of the greats have had minders. Leaves you free to concentrate on what’s important, right?”
What was important, was Mathilda. She’d been restless over the last few days. She’d been on the phone for hours to her agent, a man called Irving Something, American by birth and from the sounds of it, aiming to get back home and take Mathilda with him. It was pathetic to eavesdrop but impossible not to. Everything she did mattered to him. If she wanted to go – to London, to Hollywood, to the moon – he had to know, so he could plan around it. What was Alan saying? It sounded like something about the Borgias -
“Sorry,” said Jack. “I could have sworn you said something about Lucrezia Borgia.”
“I did. I was checking to see if you were still listening. So what do you think?”
“About being babysat by Lucrezia Borgia?”
“About being babysat by Evie.” Jack spluttered. “Alright, alright, no need to fucking choke. Why not? You know her, she knows you. She’d take good care of you. She’s willing to do it - ”
“If you ever mention this halfwit idea to me ever, ever again,” said Jack, “I’ll fire you. Swear to God.”
“No you won’t. No other bastard would sign you, the way you behave. Look, I’m not pushing for this tour because I’m some sort of sadist. You do know that, right? You do actually remember I’m on your side? All I’m trying to do is get a bit of exposure for your music, which, mind-bogglingly fucking brilliant as it is, is not going to sell itself.”
Jack could hear the sound of Mathilda’s laughter, that low, dirty laugh that thrilled down his spine. He was bored of sitting in the hallway. Was he so difficult to work with? Was his behaviour so outrageous? Other musicians drove limousines into swimming pools. “I’ll think about it,” he said.
“Liar.”
“Fuck off, Alan, I will. Okay?”
“Twenty notes says you’ll hang up and forget every word I said until next time.”
“If I pay you the twenty quid will you promise not to phone again until tomorrow?”
“It’s a deal.” Alan hung up without saying goodbye.
He put the phone carefully back into its cradle.
“So is this it, then?” asked Davey, following Priss as she painfully climbed the stairs to her room. “The end of the summer?”
Priss shrugged. “What do you think? You saw them last night. They’ll talk a lot, but they’ll give it up and call the coppers in the end. They’re probably just waiting for us to get out of Dodge before they do it. So what about you? You going home to get beaten up by your dad again?”
“Stepdad. And how did you know he - ”
“Didn’t take a genius to figure that one out,” said Priss. She sighed. “For God’s sake, I just wish - I just wanted to know. You know?” She shook her head. “And you’ve got to admit, it would be pretty fucking cool to be able to say you’d lived with a murderer.”
“You know,” said Davey, “I um, I mean, you actually - ”
“You want to come in?” Priss held open the door to her room. “Special invitation.”
“Oh. Thank you. Um, I wanted to tell you - ”
Priss was staring at her bed. “What the fuch’s that doing there?”
Davey looked, but couldn’t see anything unusual. The smooth sunburst-orange of the bedspread was immaculately smooth; Priss’ heavy black notebook lay on her pillow.
“I never make my bed until just before I get into it,” said Priss. “And I never leave my notebook out like that, it looks poncey.” She picked up the book and leafed through it. “That bastard Isaac, he’s been using my notebook to draw in. I’ll kill him when I see him. No, hang on a minute. Shit. Okay, maybe I won’t - ”
Davey peered over her shoulder. The smooth yellowy pages of her notebook were filled with black and white sketches, laid out in panels, like a graphic novel. Crowds of people swarmed up the driveway and through the door of a beautiful house – the house, Davey realised, they now stood in – while, in stark contrast, a man sat alone in the branches of the huge candelabra tree in the garden, carefully nailing up a round paper lantern.
Mathilda was pacing out the thick carpet of the chill-out room, muttering to herself under her breath, occasionally referring to the copy of Lysistrata in her hand. He perched on the arm of a magenta couch, unsure if she knew he was there or not. Part of her talent was to create the illusion of being alone before an audience. He was struck again by how self-contained she was, and how little she needed him to be happy. Her beauty and her separateness were a sharp pain in his chest.
At last, she put down the book and came to him. “Isaac’s gone.”
“Good,” said Jack, before he could stop himself. “Shit, I didn’t mean - ”
“Didn’t you?”
“I just meant it’s nice to have the place to ourselves again.”
“Because we were falling over each other all the time?” She was smiling, but he could sense the argument threatening to come to the surface.
“Yeah. He was such a pain, always chattering away when I was trying to work - ”
“You were jealous, weren’t you?”
As always, her directness wrong-footed him. “No.”
“Yes, you were. It burns you up that he’s seen me naked, doesn’t it? You were lying when you said it was fine.”
He wondered if she was looking for an excuse to argue. “No, it didn’t - oh, alright, yes it did. Okay? Is that what you wanted to hear? Why did you model for him if you knew I didn’t like it?”
“Because I didn’t care.”
He was unsure if he’d heard her right. “I’m sorry, what?”
“This,” she said, enunciating with great care, “is my body. Not yours. Mine. You don’t own it. I do.”
“I know that! But I love you. I love you. It’s only natural to be jealous - ”
“Jealousy is for cavemen. What happened to trust?”
“I do trust you, I just - ”
“No, you don’t. For God’s sake, Jack, is your definition of love lying awake at night wondering if the woman next to you spent the afternoon fucking somebody else?”
“Well, have you? Have you been fucking him?” Jack was vaguely aware how destructive this question was, but was too angry to stop himself. The words had hovered on the end of his tongue for weeks now. He couldn’t keep them caged any longer.
“Well, what if I have? What then, Jack?”
“Then - then - ”
“Then I wouldn’t be all yours after all? What makes you think you get all of me anyway? Did you think I was a virgin?”
“I never really - it’s none of my business, is it? I mean, obviously we’re all entitled to our past.”
“And what about your past? Your past that keeps turning up on the doormat every morning?”
“If you mean Evie, we were only ever just - ”
“Jack, if the next word out of your mouth is going to be friends, you’re the biggest fucking hypocrite I’ve ever met in my life.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You could at least own up to what you’ve done. You’ve already lost one woman her career. You’re not doing the same to me.”
“I have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about.”
From between the pages of Lysistrata, she took out an envelope. A letter from Evie, already opened.
“You opened my post?”
She dropped it beside him onto the magenta velvet. “Get the plank out your own eye first. You bastard.”
Together, Priss and Davey leafed through the pages. A girl with long hair climbed the tree and sat next to the man. Another girl, naked, her eyes huge and black, trod a perilous path down thr
ough the woods to the enclosure where a black shape prowled impatiently behind the bars.
“This is fucking brilliant,” said Priss.
“Why aren’t there any words?” Davey asked.
“That’s the writer’s job.” Priss turned over more pages. “Look, she’s jumped into the cage. Hey, is that who I think it is?”
In the corner of the page, a man with dark curly hair watched in horror as the girl plunged into the panther’s lair.
“That’s Isaac,” he said incredulously.
You’ll find it hardest when you’re stressed. Knowing it didn’t make the craving easier to ignore. The medicine cabinet in the annexe called to him. The only way to stay ahead of it was to walk and walk, pacing out rooms and corridors through luxurious decadence to crumbling ruin and back to decadence again, as he tried to put together what he’d just read in Evie’s letter.
He forced himself to examine the few shards of memory he’d held on to. The journey from the hospital, sweating with fear, trying to hold it together in an office somewhere, lying through his teeth to the shrink, no, nothing, nothing since I was admitted, not a thing, I swear, knowing the shrink wasn’t fooled. Being searched, his suitcase and then himself, the blaze of panic when they found his stash. Understanding murmurs, worse than accusations. Hallucinations, things slouching in corners, voices whispering and giggling, creatures on his bedclothes and on his skin. The haze of pills clearing, leaving a dreadful clarity filled with everything he’d been running from. No sleep. He’d lost eleven days he worked out afterwards, and was glad to have done so.
And somewhere in all of that, he’d apparently -Was it even possible?
Was Evie telling the truth? He didn’t believe her. He’d barely been able to walk when he arrived, never mind have sex. And surely, surely he’d have some vague recollection? But there was simply nothing there. Nothing but an eleven-day gap in his brain.
He could see Mathilda coming out onto the lawn from the woods.
Which would sound worse? To tell Mathilda that yes, she was right, he’d ended Evie’s career and then abandoned her without remorse or hesitation? Or to confess he’d fucked up his brain so profoundly that he simply had no recollection of the events Evie described? Would it make things better or worse to go and talk to her?
She caught sight of him, beckoned him impatiently outside.
“This must be the story of what happened here,” said Davey.
“I bet you were ten minutes late for your own birth.” Priss flicked impatiently through the pages. “That’s Evie, look, she looks just like her photos. That girl from the tree, that’s probably Mathilda - and that guy must be Jack Laker.” She shook her head in disbelief. “Jack Laker. We’re living in Jack Laker’s house. No, that still sounds ridiculous. I mean, I don’t even like Jack Laker. Christ, if he’s killed someone every fan in the Western world’ll be sobbing into their Cheerios.”
“You really didn’t know, did you,” said Mathilda as soon as he got close enough. “I thought maybe you were faking it so you didn’t have to talk about it. But you really, really didn’t know.”
“I still don’t know,” he said. “I can’t remember a thing. Not a thing.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“That’s how bad it was.”
“That’s how bad what was?”
He was in court, under oath. No escape. No excuses. His chest was tight. “I was out of contract with Island,” he said at last. He scrabbled in his pocket for something to destroy, found a biro, pulled out the ink-tube. “I was going to sign with Gumshoe, but then they went up in smoke. And I really thought that was it. Fifteen minutes over. Then Alan turned up at a gig one night with a contract in his pocket. Next thing I know, Violet Hour was double platinum and I had four top ten singles off it. I still don’t know why.”
“I know you don’t.”
“So there I was, a freak superstar with forty dates booked in these massive venues. And it’s like a deal with the Devil, you know? I don’t know why I was surprised. It’s not even a secret, not really. You know when you start it’s going to be screams whenever they see you and mad people hanging around the stage door afterwards, and hotel rooms, and a messed-up sleep schedule, and everyone treating you like some kind of holy idiot, and never having time to work, and forgetting to call your mother, and absolutely no personal space, and sycophantic interviews, and girls in the dressing room, and junk food, and drugs. You know what it’s going to be like, but somehow you think you’ll be different. No, I mean, I thought I was going to be different.”
“You don’t have to tell me this.”
“Yes. Yes, I do. See, the thing is I’m a writer, not a jukebox. Once the album’s finished, I just want to put it out there and get onto the next thing. But the fans aren’t there for new. They want familiar. So every night, the same show, over and over, note-perfect, and they’d be ecstatic, then every morning I’d be in the hotel room with my ears ringing, trying to hear the music, the new music. But I was too tired. So Alan got me these Dexedrine tablets.”
“And then you couldn’t sleep.”
“And then I couldn’t sleep. So he got me some Valium.
That made me sleep alright, Christ - the first time I took one I thought I was going to die. But then there was always the speed to wake me up. And that’s how it started.”
“So could you write then?”
“No, that’s the fucking stupid thing. It never worked. But once I’d started, I couldn’t stop it. See, I wanted to write, but nobody else cared if I did or not. They just needed me to perform. They were getting me everything they could think of to keep me going, and trying to cheer me up by - ” the pen snapped in half. “Oh, fuck, I still can’t believe I - ”
“The girls in the dressing room?”
“Yeah. I mean, you always get groupies, but suddenly there were so many more of them. There was this one gig. The Phoenix. I met a kid back stage. Just a kid. And his kid girlfriend. Alan was picking girls out of the crowd. I saw him pick her. A fucking schoolgirl! And Christ, if you think what I did with Evie was - ” he shook his head. “That was the worst night. The very worst one.”
“Did you? With her, I mean? The schoolgirl?”
“No. I took every goddamn pill I had. And then a pint of Jack Daniels on top. They found me in my hotel room, passed out in a pool of piss and vomit.”
“She looks like him,” said Priss, studying Isaac’s drawing of the girl in the cage. “If he grew his hair, he’d be the spit of her. I bet she’s his sister.” She turned the page and disclosed a double-page spread showing a row of beds with Evie, in a nurse’s uniform, moving between them. One of the patients was Jack, lank-haired and skeletal. In another bed, Evie bent low over the girl with the dark eyes.
“And did you really say all that to Evie?” Mathilda asked. “Did you tell her you’d die without her? That you needed her? That you couldn’t survive without her?”
“I might have done. Addicts’ll say anything when they’re desperate.” He paused. “I mean, we’ll say anything when we’re desperate. But I honestly can’t remember.”
“Not even a flicker?”
“Not even a flicker. Look, I should have told you all this before, I know I should. I’m sorry. I should have warned you how bad it can be, living with an addict. I mean I damaged my brain, didn’t I? It’ll never work quite right again. I can’t drink or take drugs, or risk going anywhere near anything that might make me want to drink or take drugs. It could happen again, at any time, from now until the day I die. All that fucking grandstanding about that stash I keep up in the annexe, that story about the landmine - that’s bullshit. The truth is I’m too weak to get rid of it.”
She was looking across the lawn into the woods.
“Look,” said Priss, “they’re having a massive row. Jack and Evie and Mathilda. D’you reckon he asked them for a threesome?” She paged on through the manuscript. “And what’s Isaac doing in all these pictures? Did he, like, live with
them or something?” She turned over the pages. “Oh, no! No fucking way!”
“What? What?”
“He did the artwork,” said Priss, sounding outraged. “Fuching Isaac fucking painted the fuching cover artwork for the fucking Landmark album. Isaac! I’ve known guys who’d walk over their mother’s entrails to meet the guy who painted that cover. Damn it, I wanted to meet a murderer.”
“You know,” said Davey, “you still might have - ”
“Give over, posh boy. I want to see what happens next.”
“I’m sorry,” Jack repeated. “I wish I was a different man, a better man. And I really wish I was the kind of man who wouldn’t get jealous just because a young, good-looking, talented guy who you clearly get on with got to see you naked.” He waited, but she kept silent. “You know, you could tell me you think he’s repulsive and it drives you nuts the way he never speaks.”
“Isaac’s queer,” said Mathilda.
“He’s what?” Jack was astounded. “Are you sure? How do you know?”
“Does that bother you?”
“No, I suppose not, but - ” he shook his head, feeling the events of the last two months rearrange themselves into a surprising new pattern. “I had no idea, are you sure?”
“I’m sorry too,” said Mathilda. “I was jealous, you see. I didn’t like reading all those things Evie said you said to her. And I wanted to see how the painting would turn out.” She took his hand gently. “But I should have known you wouldn’t have walked away from her like that if you’d known. I don’t think you’ve ever been knowingly cruel to anyone in your life, have you?”
Hand in hand, they stood on the lawn and felt time flowing past them. The argument felt to Jack like a lock in a canal; a necessary pause in a dark and frightening place, to allow their closeness to move to a new level.
“I need to go and feed him,” he said at last, reluctantly breaking the peace.
“Why have you got that panther? You’ve never really explained.”
“I told you, I won him in a poker game.”
“Yes, but how?”
“It was when I was looking for a house. I met this old guy in a big falling-apart place in Devon. He said he’d only sell to the right person. Apparently that wasn’t me, but we got talking and then we got drinking, and we started playing. He bet me anything I wanted out of his animal collection. I was most sorry for the panther, so that’s the one I took.”
The Summer We All Ran Away Page 26