Greatest Hits

by Laura Barnett

  Angus was the least mutable person Cass had ever met, and this, she’d decided, was the source of her incipient mistrust: she simply couldn’t understand a person whose emotional state never seemed to shift out of neutral, no matter the chemicals he pumped into his body. And yet she couldn’t help but find Angus’s confidence contagious—for they were good, she knew they were, and no matter how unpromising the crowd, they would always find a way to prove it.

  In the dressing-room that evening—Angus was right: it was no larger than a wardrobe, and its mint-green paint was flaking from the walls—he handed her the requisite glass of wine, and said, as he always did, “It’ll be great. Just go out there and enjoy yourselves.”

  Ivor was perched on a battered metal chair. Cass settled herself on his lap, put her face to his neck, breathed in the smell of him: damp velvet (he was wearing the new green jacket they’d picked up the week before on Petticoat Lane); tobacco; and the faint, alluring tang of sweat.

  “All right, babe?” he said, and she looked up at him, palefaced under the stark, unshaded bulb, and said, “I will be when I’m up there.”

  Hugh, behind them, took a final swig from his bottle of Bell’s, and got to his feet.

  “Right,” he said. “Let’s go and knock their little northern socks off.”

  This is what she remembers.

  Hot lights and smoke and faces. Amps like black, gaping mouths, opening and closing, pouring out sound: the screech and howl of guitar; the deep undertow of bass, vibrating underfoot, up through leg to thigh, to chest, to brain. The thud, thud, thud of drums. The beat of the heart, the passage of blood along artery and vein. The measured drip-feed of time, now fast, now slow: unignorable, siren-like, issuing its relentless rhythm.

  Her feet stepping, unbidden, in time with the kick. Her hand cradling the neck of the instrument, claw-fingered, moving over string and fret. Her microphone close and intimate as a lover’s ear.

  Her voice, and his, and theirs. Hips moving, heads moving, and the heat of the lights and the rising clouds of cigarette smoke. The crowd staring up, all their many eyes and noses and mouths belonging to the same single, writhing creature. No place but this place, no time but this time, and she is nowhere, and everywhere, diving and swimming in this pool of sound. Waves and eddies and riptides, pulling her under. No air, no space to breathe.

  At the song’s end, she rises, and catches her breath, and there is a tiny interval of silence and stillness, so brief that she almost misses it, for they are clapping now, and shouting, beating out their own rhythms with the ancient pressure of palm on palm. And there, up on the stage above them, she is smiling, and Ivor is whispering in her ear, “Count four, then straight into ‘Living Free.’”

  It is a dream, and it is not a dream: the grey breeze-block walls, and the high, broad windows with their garlands of dust and cobweb; the psychedelic whorl of the dartboard; and the tattered posters flapping from a sheet of cork: “Bingo Wednesdays” and “Friday is Live Music Night!” and “Book now for the OAP Day Trip to Blackpool.”

  When Cass closes her eyes, leans in close to the microphone, she sees her mother, and her father, and the church on the common with its high white dome; and Ivor, and Lily and John, and Cornelia, surrounded by her empty white dresses of lace and tulle.

  She has shucked off the skin of the girl she used to be: she is wide-eyed and unafraid, rising weightlessly above the crowd. And there, high above, she thrills to it all, as they do down there on the floor. For it is here, and now, drawn by the ebb and flow of the song, that they know they are alive, and together, and that nothing can take that away from them: not now, not here, not for as long as the music lasts.

  Those years with Vertical Heights seem, now, coloured by the greyscale spectrum of night.

  Wet black tarmac and white lines, unspooling endlessly beyond the steamed-up windows of the van. The sodium flashes of motorway lights, and the blinking tail-lamps of cars. Shuttered factories, stately and silent; cooling towers exhaling their great out-breaths of steam, and the hulls of gasometers, ribbed with struts and fins of steel.

  The sudden, unforgiving glare of service-stations. Improbably jaunty waitresses in tiny skirts, pouring tea into brown china cups. The greasy Formica tables at which they sat up for hours with their own kind—some they already knew, others they recognised by their clothes, their unbrushed hair, the nocturnal energy that pulsed, electric, from them all. Whisky poured over tea dregs; joints rolled over the congealing remnants of double egg, chips, and beans. Waitresses drawn giggling outside to the lorry-park, with its long, secretive shadows.

  Music on the jukebox, and bikers milling in restive herds, and tired truckers washing down their sausage and chips with mugs of Bovril. Cass standing with Ivor on the forecourt smoking Players cigarettes, while Hugh and Danny and Angus slipped off with whichever girl had caught their eye, and she drew her arm tighter around Ivor’s waist.

  She was rarely alone, on those nights—not with the five of them crammed into the van alongside their kit; the unending cycle of loading and unloading; the crowds in the clubs, and the bright, strip-lit bustle of those service-station jamborees. And yet when she recalls those early tours, she sees herself as set slightly off-centre, a figure placed almost at the edge of the frame. The men laughing together in the back of the van, sharing a joke she hadn’t quite caught. Angus at the wheel, Cass beside him on the front seat, and the other guys tumbled together in the back like exhausted children, stretched out on the thin mattresses they’d thrown down between the drum boxes and guitar cases, and where, she knew, they sometimes brought their women after gigs.

  She was not naive about this, even then; she was not a child. Several times, Cass returned to the van or the dressing-room to find Ivor with some new slender, miniskirted girl. Each time, Cass slid her arm around Ivor’s back, or laid her head, briefly and emphatically, on his shoulder; and the girl, whoever she was, looked at her, and shrugged, and moved away.

  There were arguments, then: snarling, drunken rows that undercut the joy they shared on stage. Rows that began, most often, with Cass pointing out that Ivor encouraged these women, that he liked the attention; and Ivor throwing back at her the fact that she didn’t seem to mind too much when other men came sniffing after her.

  And it was true—they did come. Not as consistently as the women, but Cass would, some nights, become aware of the eyes of certain men in the audience watching her with an intensity that she found both unsettling and thrilling. Other men might shout things out: stupid, puerile comments that made her blush. Show us your tits, love. Got something else you can get your mouth round down here. Sometimes, Ivor would lose his temper, and turn on the audience with raised fists.

  But it was the men who said nothing that she really had to watch out for. The men who might sidle up to her in the hour or so of downtime Angus permitted them between the last song and the loading of the van, and say, as if each of these phrases were newly minted, entirely original, “Fancy a drink, darlin’?” Or, “You looked sexy up there.” Or, “So what’s a nice girl like you doing with a rabble like that?”

  One night, in Newcastle, an argument that began in the dressing-room (Hugh had brought a couple of girls backstage, and Cass had walked in to find one of them sitting on Ivor’s lap) spilt across the gig, and limped on into its aftermath.

  Cass was at the bar, finishing her fourth glass of wine and pointedly ignoring Ivor, when a man with a shaggy mane of blond hair and a sallow, fleshy face came up and offered to buy her another drink.

  “Bell’s,” she said flatly. “Double. No ice.”

  “Whisky-drinker, are you?” the man said. “Well, if we haven’t got ourselves a regular Janis Joplin.”

  He wasn’t at all her type—stocky and heavy-set, and dull with it; and anyway, she was Ivor’s, and he, she reminded herself as the whisky slid down her throat, was hers. But when the stranger asked if she’d
like to step outside, she went with him willingly, and allowed him to lead her round the back of the clubhouse, to where the shadows were thickest, and to press his slippery mouth to hers, and to place his hands on her body. And when, just a few moments later, Ivor stepped out from those shadows, furious, his arm drawing back to land a blow on the man’s face—she didn’t even know his name, and she never would—Cass stood back and watched them with an ugly sense of triumph.

  Later, in the van, when the shouting was over, Ivor leant over to her and said, quietly, “Why did you do that, Cassie? Why did you have to make a fool of me?”

  “So you’d know,” she said, “how it feels when you make one of me.”

  One dark, freezing day in late December, Cass and Ivor managed to ignore their alarm clock and sleep on through most of the morning.

  “Watch out,” Daphne whispered when Cass finally arrived at Cornelia’s shop, “she’s on the warpath.”

  Indeed, Cass was shortly called into the back office, where, among bolts of silk, tiaras, and glittering paste jewels, Cornelia said, her voice tight, “I try, as you must know by now, Cassandra, to be as patient as I can with my girls—to support you all, and your ambitions, in every way I can. But there are limits, and you, I’m afraid, have reached yours. So tell me—do you actually wish to keep this job?”

  Cass looked at her boss—at her kind, thin, hollow-eyed face. She felt tiredness settle over her; it had been a very late night—a show in Leicester, followed by a particularly boisterous gathering at the Blue Boar. She thought of the envelope that Angus had handed over as the van had finally drawn up on Savernake Road just after five. “Happy Christmas,” he’d said, as if the money were a gift. It wasn’t a lot, but it would, she decided in that moment, be enough.

  “No,” she said now: gently, because she liked Cornelia, and knew how ungrateful she must sound. She was, it seemed, becoming fluent in the language of ingratitude. “I don’t think I do.”

  “Well.” Cornelia looked down at her desk. “This will be your last shift, then. And don’t think you’ll be getting your Christmas bonus, Cassandra, or any sort of reference. I’d expected better of you. I really had.”

  It was a frenetic afternoon—brides in for final fittings for their Christmas wedding gowns, slipping on long-sleeved satin and fur wraps. Dusk fell early over Oxford Street, and Cass’s tiredness seemed to thicken until it was all she could do to keep from laying her head on the counter.

  “Irene Lewis,” Cornelia said at half-past four, as Daphne was laying an ivory silk gown carefully into its pink tissue-lined box. “First fitting, wedding next August, which hardly leaves us much time, does it?”

  “Irene Lewis?” Cass echoed.

  Cornelia looked up from her appointments book, and sighed. “Yes, Cassandra. Good to know you’re actually paying me the courtesy of listening.”

  “I’ll take that fitting,” Cass said quickly, and Cornelia gave a peremptory nod.

  “Well, I suppose we might as well get some use out of you.”

  They arrived at a quarter to five: Irene and her mother, twin figures in camel double-breasted coats, hats perched on their neat shampoo-and-sets.

  “My goodness! Maria Wheeler!” Irene’s mother said at once, beaming, and coming forward to kiss Cass on each cheek. “Whatever are you doing here?”

  Irene hung back, not quite matching her mother’s smile. “Cassandra, now, Mum,” she said. “She’s called Cassandra now.”

  “Of course.” Irene’s mother—her name, Cass remembered then, was Alice—still had a gloved hand on each of Cass’s arms. Up close, she smelt of Pond’s face-cream and hairspray, and the mingled scents took Cass back to that yellow living-room across the common, with its genteel chaos and its piano and its soft brown rug. She was filled with such a rush of nostalgia that, in her exhausted state, tears gathered in her eyes.

  Alice, kind as ever, pretended that she hadn’t noticed. “This really is the most remarkable thing. Will you be doing Irene’s fitting?”

  “How long have you been working here?” Irene asked in the fitting-room. She was undressing; Cass stood a few feet away, sliding the camel coat onto a hanger, taking Irene’s blouse, jumper, and skirt. Irene was down to her slip now, and Cass could see that her old friend had filled out: the flesh of her arms and stomach had the soft, malleable quality of unrisen dough, and her breasts were heavy, pendulous. Sensing Cass’s eyes on her, Irene drew her arms protectively across her body.

  “Just over a year,” Cass said. “But it’s just to pay the rent. I’m a singer. This is my last shift here, actually.”

  “A singer?”

  “Yes. And I play guitar. We have a band, Ivor and me. Ivor’s my boyfriend. We both write the songs.”

  “Goodness.” Irene caught Cass’s gaze in the mirror, and smiled. “That’s wonderful. I always thought . . . Oh, I don’t know. I just always thought you’d do something special, Maria. I mean Cass.”

  Cass returned her smile. “Thanks, Irene. And what are you doing these days?”

  She was studying history at University College London; her fiancé, Mike, was in his third year, too, taking medicine. They were to marry the following summer, once Irene had graduated. “Mike will have a good few years to go,” Irene explained as Cass was busying herself around the dress, pinning and tucking, drawing it out a few inches at the waist, “but it feels right to marry now. We’d like to start a family straight away.”

  She coloured a little, and Cass, to spare her old friend’s embarrassment, said, “You can have a whole brood of them, like you and your brothers. It was always so much fun at your house. There was so much light and noise.”

  “Yes.” Irene was silent for a moment; when she spoke again, her voice was deeper, more intimate. “I cried for weeks, you know, Cass. When you went off with Julia and her crowd. I’d never felt lonelier in my life.”

  Cass was grateful for her mouthful of pins. When she’d slid the last one into the hemline, she said, “I’m sorry, Irene. I really am. I suppose I lost it a bit, after . . . well, after my mother left.”

  It was the first time in many years that she’d said these words aloud. She turned away, looking for the tape measure.

  “But you were happy with your aunt and uncle, weren’t you?” Irene said. “You seem happy now.”

  “Oh yes,” Cass said, turning back to her. “I loved living at Atterley. Lily and John gave me my first guitar, and, I suppose, the confidence to start writing songs, and . . . well, I can’t tell you what that means to me. Just about everything.”

  “Good,” Irene said, and she took Cass’s hand in hers. “I’m so glad.”

  It was fully dark when the fitting ended, and the Christmas lights blinked above the street, over the milling, hatted heads of shoppers.

  At the door, Alice asked whether Cass might like to join them for a glass of mulled wine—they could find a table in the pub on the corner, wait for her to finish up. But Cass, aware of Cornelia and Daphne watching from the counter, said, “Oh, that would be lovely, but I can’t, I’m afraid. Not tonight.”

  “What a shame,” Alice said, and she leant in to kiss her again. “Well, take our number down, at least—surely you two have a lot to catch up on?”

  Irene nodded, smiled, and produced a notebook from her neat brown leather handbag. “We’re at home for Christmas. I know Dad would love to see you, too. And the boys.”

  Cass nodded. “Thank you. Happy Christmas.”

  She took the folded sheet from Irene, slid it up under the sleeve of her cardigan. But she knew, even as she did so, that she wouldn’t call—that she and Irene, after a moment or two of politeness and faintly remembered affection, would find that they had nothing at all to say to one another. And then she thought of Ivor, of that terrible moment outside the Newcastle club, that stranger’s hands on her body, and Ivor’s face made ugly by rage and incomprehensio
n, and she had the strange, disorientating sense of her life stretching out before her in this way, in a series of shifting alliances—nothing solid, nothing lasting, everything falling away as quickly as it came into being. She felt suddenly dizzy, and put out a hand to the wall.

  “Honestly,” she heard Cornelia say, “you really must go home and get some sleep, Cassandra. You look quite done in.”

  “Yes, thank you,” she heard her own voice say in turn. “I will. I’m tired. I really am so very tired.”

  TRACK SEVEN

  “Don’t Step On the Cracks”

  By Cass Wheeler

  From the album Songs From the Music Hall

  Don’t step on the cracks, he said

  That sad-eyed old man

  With the dirty and tattered blue coat

  And the bag in his hand holding everything he owned

  I told him I wouldn’t

  But that was a lie

  For I look for danger

  His rules are not mine

  Don’t step on the cracks, you said

  You’ve broken my heart again

  It’s shattered and splintered apart

  And fallen too far to make up from the start

  I told you I wouldn’t

  But that was a lie

  For I want my freedom

  And rules are not mine

  I’ll step on the cracks to get there

  Although it may seem I don’t care

  If I have to leave you, it’s not fair

  But I’ll step on the cracks to get there