‘But you say your parents are alive?’
‘They are alive. But we don’t have much of a relationship. They didn’t sing to me and encourage me like yours. Nor did they own a pig.’ I tried to smile, imagining Dad, pipe in mouth, staring with mild concern at a pig.
‘Why?’ Jan shoved a forkful of pork loin in my direction. ‘Sorry,’ he said to it. ‘I also like pigs but you taste good.’
I took it – Jan had been feeding me spontaneously throughout the meal, not in a romantic way but in a comical I-must-feed-this-woman sort of a way – although suddenly I had lost any sensation of taste. The rich, warm meat already felt like cardboard in my mouth.
This is why I avoid thinking about my family, I thought angrily.
One of the many painful fallouts from New York was the disintegration of any forgiveness or loyalty I’d felt towards my parents. Mum was a cold, horrible woman, who seemed not to care about me at all, and Dad was just a weak coward. Their seeming lack of interest in what had happened in New York and all the subsequent loss and agony I’d endured had been the final straw.
‘Ah, we had some trouble last year,’ I said vaguely. I liked Jan Borsos, and I was touched by the honesty of many of the things he’d told me tonight. But to open the can of worms marked ‘Howlett Family’ – particularly over dinner – would be pretty inappropriate.
I tried to explain without actually explaining. ‘There was a bit of a disaster on a work trip to New York, lots of things happened … The family got split up somewhat and it’s all been really difficult since. I mean it’s OK, but …’
But what? It wasn’t OK. I had never expected love or warmth from my family but their conspicuous absence since I’d returned was more painful than I could possibly have imagined.
Jan Borsos, sensing that this was too dark for me to go into, leaned over and touched the side of my face, smiling gently in a way that told me everything would be OK. It was the gesture of a man twice his age, but it touched me. ‘I am sorry too,’ he said. ‘I miss my parents every day but I did always know that they loved me. They were telling me all the time, “We love you, Jan, we are proud of you, Jan, we hail you, Jan.” ’
I smiled sadly. ‘We hail you, Jan.’ I’d hail Jan Borsos. I’d be proud of him if he were my son.
‘We will talk of other subjects,’ he announced, after a respectful silence. ‘Such as your singing. Sally, why do you hate to sing for people?’
‘My singing. Ah. Well, that’s another matter,’ I bluffed. ‘Um, any chance we could change the subject a third time?’
‘No,’ Jan Borsos replied. ‘The subject of your singing is nationally important.’
I burst out laughing. ‘What?’
‘Ah.’ Jan consulted his notebook, flipping back a few pages. Then his eyes lit up. ‘I think your singing is a matter of national importance,’ he read triumphantly. ‘This is a good phrase, no?’
‘It’s a very good phrase. Who taught it you?’
‘Helen.’
Helen had a very good turn of phrase. The text message she’d sent me en route to my date had read: You and Jan = the impossible couple I’ve waited my whole life to see. If you mate, I will die happy.
‘I like Helen.’ I smiled.
Jan agreed. ‘She is the funny woman. She also does not like to sing for people. I think you are both very strange. You both sing beautifully.’
‘Oh, you’ve heard Helen sing?’ Then something dawned on me. ‘Hang on, you’ve heard me sing?’
Jan looked delighted. ‘Ha-ha! Yes! Ha-ha!’
Panic. ‘What? How?’
‘A voice like yours can fill a stadium,’ he said. ‘You do not think that the wardrobe stops us listening to you?’
I put down my knife and fork, horrified. The same old anxiety – so familiar it was like the arrival of an old friend – bowled in rapidly and took me over. Suddenly I was seven years old once more, cowering in the bath after shaming myself onstage.
‘Who’s been listening to me?’ I stammered.
Jan looked perplexed. ‘Everybody,’ he said. ‘We stand outside Room 304 and listen whenever you are singing in the wardrobe with Brian. The sound is glorious. Julian Jefferson is listening every time. He has the closed eyes while you sing.’
‘Fuck,’ I muttered. I didn’t like swearing but ‘fuck’ barely covered this. Why couldn’t everyone just leave me alone? Why couldn’t Julian just LET ME BE? He had no right to hang around being all misty-eyed. It was too bloody late to start caring about me after ruining my life.
‘I want you to stop listening to me,’ I said weakly.
Jan shook his head. ‘No. You have the most beautiful, powerful voice that any of us are ever hearing,’ he said. ‘How could we leave you alone? It would be against the law. I would have to telephone Interpol.’
I tried to relax. Perhaps – just perhaps – it was OK for me to sing if people really believed me to be that good.
‘Either singing is or it is not,’ Jan Borsos said. It was an unexpected and rather impressive aphorism for a man with such erratic English. ‘What do you choose?’
Jan Borsos was right. Singing was or it was not. I had been told by some of the very finest singers that I was excellent. Was it possible that I might actually try it?
After all, what else was I going to do? Just leave college again when my four weeks came to an end?
Jan Borsos broke into my thoughts. ‘I will answer for you,’ he said squarely. ‘Singing IS. It is, for you, Sally. I do not want to have to collect my pistol and shoot you because of this.’
‘Singing is.’ I held out my right hand to shake on it, realizing that I would just have to keep working on my fear. Singing was right for me. The end.
Jan opted to kiss my hand rather than shake it. He pulled my arm towards him and kissed it all the way up to my elbow, which I found surprisingly enjoyable. The pub swayed and shimmered around me. I was drunk and surprisingly happy.
My resolve not to go for an after-dinner drink was forgotten. Jan Borsos took me to a converted public toilet underneath Shepherd’s Bush Green where a hip-hop and rap night was in full swing. Hazy on Rioja and high on life, I danced with that madman – who turned out to be a really rather splendid mover, even within the confines of his tux – and when he stood on a step and kissed me with a Wagnerian passion it felt like the obvious thing to do: I put my arms round his little barrel of a chest and kissed him back. He was young and handsome. He had married a répétiteur. He had got divorced. He had studied with László Polgár in Switzerland or somewhere. He had walked Europe. He was a legend.
Scene Thirteen
The next morning I woke up with Jan Borsos in his bedroom in halls. It was all nineties peach and muted mushroom, blond wood and frosted lightshades. His bed was narrow but his duvet magnificent. Heavy, warm and covered with a typically odd floral print.
I was deeply hungover and covered with a sticky film of sweat. I smelt bad. This was something I instinctively knew but, thankfully, the tiny room was full of the smell of frying bacon, so my foulness was masked.
Hang on. The tiny room was filled with the smell of bacon?
Yes. The tiny room was filled with the smell of frying bacon. Being Jan Borsos, he had rigged up a tiny camping stove in the corner of the room. He was standing at it in Y-fronts cooking bacon, singing softly to Aida which was coming out of a record player. Of course Jan Borsos had carried a record player across Europe. Every single thing about Jan Borsos felt like it was from the sort of film you’d never believe.
I tried and failed to remember what had happened last night. I had a vague notion of jumping on the MC’s mic at one point, mumbling something about diggity-doggity, and a potential snogging/grinding incident on a street corner. But coming back to his room? Having sex? Nothing.
For clarification I gave myself a quick body-frisk under the duvet. I hadn’t had sex with Jan Borsos! There was fabric covering my lady parts! I stole a glance back over at Jan in his Y-fronts. He looked exci
ting and mad and really quite handsome.
As he flipped over the bacon, a pile of hair fell into his face. ‘La fatal pietra sovra me si chiuse,’ he sang softly, and the richness of his voice made me shiver. Beyond him the morning sky was filthy brown and tempestuous. Jan notched up his voice a little more and I felt a rush of strange sensations. Another man had once won me over with his voice, far away in a poets’ café in Alphabet City. But the other man, it had turned out, was not to be trusted. Here in Jan Borsos’s nineties bedroom I felt I was as safe as I possibly could be.
‘Hello,’ I croaked.
‘Sally.’ He smiled. ‘I cook bacon.’
‘I know. It smells amazing.’ It did. I shifted up a bit, conscious that I was still only wearing a vest and pants. ‘Um, Jan, about last night.’
I waited for him to say that it was silly and we should forget about it. But he said nothing of the sort. Instead he hopped over the short distance to the bed and jumped in beside me, snapping his bacon tongs like castanets. He kissed me without any trace of shyness or morning-after reserve. The tongs continued to snap away to some Cuban rhythm that bore no relation to the melodic Verdi on the record player.
When I realized that I was far more interested in kissing Jan Borsos than I was in eating bacon, I grinned. I was glad we hadn’t had any sex yet. I was rather looking forward to it. We’d go on a date maybe early next week. And then another, and then we’d do it. Barry had always told me it was imperative I never slept with anyone until at least the third date. ‘IMPERATIVE, CHICKEN,’ I imagined him saying threateningly.
Suddenly Jan Borsos had put his hand inside my pants and IMPERATIVE, CHICKEN was forgotten. What was he … Oh my … ‘OH!’ Nerve-endings crackled between my legs. I wondered vaguely what he had done with the bacon tongs and then forgot to wonder.
‘Oh, my goodness,’ I heard myself say. Had I been more conscious of anything other than Jan’s hands I’d probably have started laughing. Me lying there, all sweaty and smelly, bleating, ‘Oh, my goodness!’ while Jan fumbled with my pants underneath a frilly duvet in Shepherd’s Bush. But this was no time for laughter.
Three seconds later, it was. Without warning, Jan leaned over and turned up the volume of the record player. The melody of the final duet blasted out, as Aida and Radamès prepared to die, and waves of pain and passion crested thunderously. Outside the sky exploded and a great boom of early-morning thunder rent the air. I started laughing. Jan’s face retained its customary glare but I knew he was laughing too. We were going to have operatic thundery sex. There was no doubt about it.
With another impressive movement, Jan Borsos swished the duvet off me, although it was so thick and heavy that it got stuck around my knees and he had to wriggle down to kick it off properly. He staggered up to a standing position above me, amid the lightning and the Verdi, to which he was singing sporadically. I lay underneath him, giggling and twitching, hoping for more fumbling very soon.
‘ “Morir! Si pura e bella,” ’ he sang. And then, in a variation on the traditional magician’s trick that I would probably remember for the rest of my life, Jan Borsos whipped out a condom from behind his left ear, which he then managed to drop down the side of the bed.
Another thunderclap tore through the sky, shaking the building, as he tried to pull the bed away from the wall to get at the condom. He failed. Anxious that it was because I was too heavy, I leaped out, then jumped under the duvet on the floor, suddenly shy, just as he wrenched the bed out from the wall.
It hit me on the forehead and I yelped. Jan Borsos yelped. He kissed my head, while reaching out behind me to rescue the errant condom. Clearly he couldn’t reach it because he leaned so hard on me that we both fell sideways into his lacy floral duvet.
I started laughing. Jan Borsos, furious-faced, followed suit.
‘Let’s start again,’ I said. I reached for my handbag and took my lucky condom out of my wallet, discreetly checking its best-before date. It had been a while. Jan Borsos heaved the bed back into place, pulled the duvet back on, then laid me on top of it, like a delicate princess. He was surprisingly strong for such a little man.
‘Cariad,’ he murmured, slightly to my surprise. Barry sometimes used that word. It meant ‘sweetheart’ in Welsh. Jan stroked my legs reverently, as if their excessive width and dimpled texture was the most marvellous thing he had ever seen.
‘Cariad,’ he repeated, moving as if to sweep off my knickers casually with his stroking hand. Unfortunately, his watch caught on the cheap lace and we found ourselves stuck together. It took a lot of scrabbling and eventually a pair of scissors to unhook him. Any passion and spontaneity that still remained – and it was dubious as to whether there was any now – was finally destroyed when I raised my hips in that ungainly vertical pelvic thrust that allows knickers to be removed, just as Jan nipped down to remove them with his teeth. I hit him on the nose with my pubic bone. So hard that he gasped.
After another embarrassing hiatus, we got into a position and state of nudity that was actually conducive to sex. And just as I began to forget about the last abominable ten minutes, the bacon pan in the corner, which had been left unattended all this time, finally caught fire and the smoke alarm went off.
It was quite a surprise when, after a mortifying twenty minutes standing in a street off the Goldhawk Road, we went back inside and managed to have excellent, randy sexy sex with not a cock-up in sight. Except, of course, for Jan’s.
ACT THREE
Scene Nine
September 2011, Brooklyn, New York
The day after I met Julian Bell I woke up and smiled right down to my toes.
I had met a man so amazing that my toes were smiling! And, rather than feel alarmed by the intensity of what had happened last night, I felt good. In fact, I felt so good that, for the first time in my life, I forgot to eat breakfast. I just ran around the living-room bit of our warehouse apartment squeaking, ‘Raaah!’ and ‘Feeeck!’ and ‘Eeeee!’ and when Barry wandered in and found me doing these very uncharacteristic things he laughed so much that he had to sit on the floor. Then he got up and joined me, and we raaahed and eeeeed for quite a long time. ‘SEXY MAN FRIEND FOR SALLY,’ Barry hissed, from time to time, performing a series of grands jetés across the floor in his pants. ‘SEXY TIMES!’
Today was Fiona’s twenty-ninth birthday, and Bea and I had planned a surprise party to which we’d invited all of the people we’d met since being in New York. I had ordered a massive cake from one of the stalls at the Smorgasburg, a big food market for the trendies of Williamsburg. Barry had put together a ‘streetdance interpretation of Fiona Lane’ that he assured me would amuse rather than enrage (there was a fine line with Fiona when it came to laughing at herself). And, of course, there was also the small matter of a world-famous band playing. Raúl and his bandmates from the Branchlines had just finished recording an album and had promised to sing everything from their much-loved Non-Sonic album of 2007 and nothing from their subsequent recordings, which had been written for trendier mortals than us.
When I’d said goodbye to Julian last night, he’d said, ‘If I hadn’t lost my cell, like the total douche that I am, I’d be messaging you all day, saying what a great time I had. So I want you to pretend you’re getting those messages all day long, OK?’
I was doing just that, this morning, and I felt insane with excitement. I was happy! Everyone was happy!
Or so I thought.
Fiona, since giving up drinking, had got a lot better at mornings. But today, when I surfaced at ten, there had been no sign. For a moment I was mildly surprised: the narrative that had played out in my head was that while I had been doing hard romance on the Wythe Hotel balcony last night, Fiona and the others would have come home and gone to bed.
I’d forgotten she’d started drinking again. I really hope she didn’t overdo it, I thought nervously.
When Fiona and Raúl emerged from her bedroom at midday, all rat hair and vodka fumes, my heart sank. ‘Murgh,’ she
said, when I bade her happy birthday. She didn’t look in my direction. Instead she made for the fridge and drank some orange juice straight from the bottle. Then she stopped, looked at the nutritional information and put the carton away again. ‘Fucking America,’ she muttered.
‘Eh?’
‘They put sugar in fucking everything. Even in juice.’
‘Oh, Freckle, you have to have something in your belly …’
With a brittle expression on her face that I didn’t like, Fiona took a martyred and huffy glass of water from the tap and slunk over to Raúl, who was skulking around near the door, readying to leave.
This was the Fiona I was used to. Hungover and looking at calories. Seeds of worry began to sprout.
‘Fucking OW,’ she mewed at Raúl, pointing at her head, as he opened the door. I could tell she wanted him to stay longer, and knew that she would gladly cancel our birthday lunch if he did. But instead he kissed her politely goodbye, telling her to have a good day, and left.
They’d had a fight. It was obvious. Raúl, normally open and expansive, was folded tightly into himself and hadn’t even said goodbye to me.
After Fiona shut the door behind him she stood in front of the mirror and checked her arms, legs and stomach, pinching at imaginary fat and pulling her flat belly in so tightly that her ribs sawed at her skin. Her face had the furious look that I recognized as ‘My body is not as it should be.’ She slunk off to her bedroom, radiating anger. Shortly after that her door opened and my heart sank even further. She was all hectic and sniffy and pinched, and she was wearing her running gear. With her hair pulled back in a severe ponytail she ran out of the door, ready to pound McCarren Park and work off all of the extra fat she didn’t possess.
I didn’t like it at all.
Not too long after she returned, though, the New Fiona was back. She’d showered, eaten something and was dressed in a pair of expensive trousers and a lovely vest. She had makeup on and was full of energy; she even came over to me for a birthday hug. I forced myself to write off her earlier performance as a one-off hangover.
The Unfinished Symphony of You and Me Page 17