Greatest Hits

by Laura Barnett

  “To think,” the singer, Ricky, said to Cass before a gig in Syracuse, lifting his tumbler of whisky to chime with her glass of red wine, “that my mates from school are sat in the boozer right now drinking bitter while I’m out here. Makes your head spin, doesn’t it, love?”

  Together, they played basements, dingy and dark-walled, lit by table candles and wall sconces. (Cass was comfortable there: they reminded her of Joe’s bar.) University campuses: wood panelling and clean white plasterwork and flags flying over manicured lawns. Saloons, with their neon beer signs and bowls of French fries and shimmering foil curtains casting a nacreous glamour over the tiny raised stage.

  She remembers the billows of smog over Cleveland, the mirrored sidings of Chicago skyscrapers, the snow clinging to the frozen banks of Lake Michigan. The Puritan Experience had a good-sized bus and a proper crew, but Cass and the boys travelled in an ancient, spluttering Dodge, hardly larger than Alan’s van back home. The bank seats served as hard, uncomfortable sofas by day, and converted into bunks by night: just four diminutive slots, when there were six of them trying to snatch an hour or two of sleep when they could.

  Tyson, their driver and roadie, was a small, wiry Pittsburgher with a head of cherubic black curls and a full, luxuriant beard. He was taciturn by day—especially when the truck gave out entirely, as it often did—and loquacious by night, especially after distributing the white powder he would acquire, at each stop-off, from some mysterious, unseen source.

  Cass tried cocaine herself a handful of times, but then never bothered with it again. (No journalist would ever believe this, later, but it was the truth.) The drug’s speed and lucidity held an appeal, especially after another sleepless night crammed in beside Ivor, a tangle of limbs vying for space beneath unwashed nylon sheets. But Cass found the tiredness that inevitably followed—the weight of it, settling over her, making her limbs feel solid, ungainly, and dredging her mind of thought—so intolerable that any hold the drug might have had over her was quickly lost. The men—with the exception of Alan, who eschewed drugs of all kinds, bar alcohol—felt differently, and slipped most of their per diems Tyson’s way.

  The men liked to stay up into the early hours, singing, playing cards, while Cass pressed her face against the thin pillow and tried to sleep. And there were, as a consequence, many nights when sleep eluded her entirely, and she would climb over to the front seat of the van, beside Alan (he shared the driving with Tyson), and take up her sketchpad.

  Their adjacent positions, their easy silence, were familiar to them both, comforting; they might have been in England, back on the M1, were it not for the wide ribbon of the freeway, the exotic place names, the tangle of overhead cables and traffic lights and neon signs stamping their giddy colours on the dark. TEXACO. LIQUORS. MOTEL. At such a sign, perhaps one night in three, the truck would shudder to a halt behind the other band’s bus, and they would all slip gratefully into beds with proper mattresses and clean sheets. And alone, finally alone, Ivor and Cass would reach for each other, explore the familiar landscape of their bodies, and then, exhausted, drift off into sleep.

  She remembers that their old closeness, their easy intimacy, returned in those weeks. The fractious tensions of the previous few months—Ivor’s jealousy, or disappointment, or whatever name she might give to the way he had looked at her as if he hardly knew her at all—seemed to disappear. She recalls no women; no long-haired, large-eyed strangers disappearing with Ivor into some dark back room. The whole trip, in fact, she remembers as rather sweetly chaste. Alan had been seeing Rachel, Martin’s secretary, for six months, and already appeared to have no interest in other women. (In just over a year, in fact, Rachel would become Alan’s wife, and remain so for the next forty years.)

  Kit was fervently in love with his dancer, Alison: each time they landed in a new town, his primary concern was to establish the time difference, and then find a payphone to place a staggeringly expensive call to London.

  Only Graham, Tyson, and two members of the Puritan Experience were single, and they picked up a woman or two along the way, but even they seemed to be holding back. And so there was, for all the privations—their limited funds; the freezing temperatures; the jostling for space inside that old bone-shaker of a truck—a sense of shared endeavour that she would never quite find again with any other group of musicians, on any other tour.

  Before they had left New York City, Cass had also written a letter to her mother in Toronto.

  They were not crossing into Canada—not on this tour, anyway—but they had a date booked in Buffalo, New York, a city that, on the roadmap Alan spread out across their table in a Sixth Avenue diner one afternoon, seemed unignorably close to her mother and to her half-sister, Josephine.

  I’m here, Cass wrote. Well, not in Canada, but America. We’ll be in Buffalo on Wednesday 15 February. I thought perhaps you and Josephine might like to come and hear me sing.

  A reply came two days later, care of the Macdougal Street hotel, just as they were packing to leave.

  Josephine is still a little young for concerts, Margaret wrote. But we could certainly drive down to meet you for lunch. Len will be at work, I’m afraid—as I would usually be on a Wednesday afternoon. (You may remember that I’m working now, part-time, as a receptionist for our family doctor—I’m sure I put that in one of my letters.) But I will book a day off, and arrange to take Josephine out of school. She’s desperate to meet you. Just tell us where to come.

  Ivor, after reading the letter, fixed Cass with a shrewd look. “Are you really sure about this?”

  She nodded. “Where shall I tell them to meet?”

  “Ask Alan. He has all the answers, doesn’t he? But just so you know, Cassie . . .” Ivor placed a hand on her arm; in the pale light of the morning (it had snowed heavily overnight, and the streets were brilliant with it), his face was grey, its shadows deep. “I think you’re making a mistake.”

  Ivor and I will meet you outside the Firelight Café on Main Street at one o’clock, Cass wrote back. (They weren’t due to sound-check until five, and Alan and Tyson thought they should be able make it there from Syracuse by lunchtime, weather permitting.)

  Buffalo was a handsome city of broad avenues and elegant skyscrapers built of red brick and glass. The snowfall, here, had been significant—downtown, grimy drifts were still compacted against lamp-posts and kerbsides, but the roads were passable, and cracks were forming in Lake Erie’s frozen skin. The Firelight Café was about halfway along Main Street; it was closed, but Cass and Ivor huddled under its red awning, drawing their scarves up over their ears. The others had gone off in the truck to find a diner, and a phone.

  “All right?” Ivor said, his voice muffled by the thick wool of his scarf; and Cass, swaddled in her own, leant in and said, “I don’t know.”

  Margaret Steadman did not keep them waiting long. She wore a brown tweed coat with a fur collar, and a cloche hat in a matching shade. From one of her hands, sheathed in brown leather gloves, dangled a tall, large-boned child wrapped in sheepskin, a navy beret perched prettily on her long blonde hair. It was the girl Cass focused on first, not quite ready to acknowledge her mother’s sudden presence—the undeniable solidity of her, standing just a few inches away.

  “Hello,” she said to the child, who looked back at her with wide, slanted brown eyes that, she could see straight away, were the precise shape and shade of her own. “I’m your sister, Cass.”

  “Hello,” the girl replied, clear-voiced, without a trace of shyness. “I’m Josephine.”

  Behind them, Margaret and Ivor were exchanging a cautious greeting. Cass turned, faced her mother squarely for the first time. She saw a woman in comfortable middle age; a broad, plain face leavened by those same lively dark eyes. She was extravagantly, inexpertly made up—her powder had gathered and clotted, and her pink lipstick had seeped into the tiny fissures around her mouth. Margaret was, Cass understood, more
nervous than she was, and the knowledge made her feel distantly sorry for her mother; as she had, a few days before, for a woman she and Ivor had seen on the New York subway, smartly dressed, walking from car to car with a crumpled photograph, asking each person she passed, in a polite, desperate, Southern voice, Could you tell me, please—have you seen my son?

  “Maria,” Margaret said, and she brought her cool cheek close to Cass’s, left the imprint of a kiss. Then, as she moved away, she checked herself, and said, “No. Of course. You’re Cassandra now.”

  They chose the first open restaurant they could find. It was an Italian, almost empty, but filled with warm, appetising smells: garlic, rosemary, roasting meat. Accordion music played at a low volume, barely audible. They went about the business of ordering. Cass and Ivor wanted wine; Margaret said she didn’t usually drink, but was persuaded to accept a glass of Chianti.

  Josephine sucked her Coca-Cola through a straw. Under her sheepskin coat, she was wearing a hand-knitted jumper (white rabbits gambolling on apple-green wool), a blue denim skirt, and thick white tights. She talked incessantly, of school and softball and their house in Toronto and where Cass and Ivor lived and whether London was bigger than Toronto and why were they in America and which instruments did they play and how did they write songs and why did they write them and was it very hard to do?

  Cass was glad of her half-sister’s chatter, and she answered most of her questions while Ivor and Margaret drank the larger part of the wine, her mother’s cheeks gradually acquiring a reddish rash that clashed unflatteringly with her rust-coloured cardigan. From time to time, Cass glanced across at her, weighing the woman she carried in her mind—hard, inaccessible, given to sudden, unpredictable bouts of fury—against the woman sitting here at the table, so bland and unthreatening. The two were simply irreconcilable.

  After dessert—fat, cream-filled cannoli for Josephine; coffee, hot and strong and served in tiny white china cups, for the adults—Josephine said she needed to go to the bathroom. Margaret offered to go with her, but the child shook her head and set off determinedly on her own. Ivor, looking from Cass to Margaret, slipped on his coat, and said he was stepping outside for some air. And then they were alone, Cass and her mother, for the first time in almost twelve years, sitting at a restaurant table in Buffalo, New York, neither of them quite sure what to say.

  A moment passed, then two. Margaret said, “Lily tells me Francis isn’t doing too well.”

  Cass looked beyond her mother, through the plate-glass windows to the street, where Ivor was a dark-coated silhouette, black wool against whitish cakes of snow, cupping a cigarette with his hand as he held a lighter to its tip.

  “I’m sorry,” Margaret said.

  Cass shifted her gaze to her mother’s face. The red rash had only partly faded, leaving a livid leopard scatter across her cheeks and nose.

  “Rosacea,” Margaret said quietly. “That’s why I don’t usually drink. Alcohol brings it on.”

  Cass nodded. Still she said nothing. Through the window, she watched a man in a dark grey jacket stop beside Ivor, who then offered him a light. The two men’s mouths opening and closing as they exchanged the banal cordialities of strangers.

  “I was very unhappy, you know,” Margaret said, in the same small voice. “Very unhappy, until I met Len. I couldn’t go on, Cassandra. It was my only chance.”

  “So,” Cass said, “you decided just to start again, did you? To pretend you didn’t already have a husband, or a daughter. To move to the other side of the world and make a new family.”

  She met her mother’s eyes then. There was so much she had imagined saying to her, in those painful, dislocated months—years—after Margaret had left. And yet she had said none of it—she had ignored her mother’s letters; she hadn’t given breath to the questions hanging unanswered in her mind. And now, it seemed, it was too late. This woman was not the vicar’s wife who had packed her case one Saturday morning more than a decade ago, before the house was stirring, and stolen silently across the common to meet the man she believed would restore her to life, no matter the cost. Margaret was another woman now: a wife; a doctor’s receptionist; a mother come up to town for the afternoon with the young daughter for whom she had slowly, painstakingly, knitted white rabbits across the bodice of a green jumper: weaving more love, more tenderness, into each purl and plain-stitch than she had ever offered the daughter she had left behind.

  “My girl.” Margaret’s eyes were wet; she reached across the table, laid her hand over Cass’s, but Cass snatched it away. “My daughter. My God, it was so hard to leave you. Can’t you see that? Can’t you imagine? But I was so unwell, back then, don’t you see? I wasn’t a good mother to you. I thought you’d be better off without me.”

  Cass closed her eyes. “That is true,” she said. “You weren’t, and I was.”

  “They have real flowers in the bathroom, Mom,” Josephine said. She had reappeared beside their table without either of them noticing. “Lilies, I think. Are they the big white flowers, with the orange powder on the sticky-out bits?”

  “Yes, darling,” Margaret said, removing her gaze from Cass’s face. From her handbag she produced a tissue, and dabbed at the corners of her eyes. “The stamens. Those are lilies.”

  Out on the street, they said their goodbyes: kisses on the cheek for Josephine, brief, polite embraces for Margaret. And then Cass’s mother and half-sister were gone, two figures walking hand in hand towards the parking-lot, and the car that would carry them home to Canada.

  Ivor threaded his arm around Cass’s shoulders, and held her close; then slowly they retraced their steps along the street.

  They had to drive a long way south-west to see the snow begin to melt.

  It was cold in St. Louis, but not the still, glacial cold of Cleveland and Chicago. Waking early in the morning in the fugged, stale heat of the truck, they found the Missouri freeway gilded with a fine layer of frost that by mid-afternoon had melted away.

  They played a club called Ace’s Cowshed Lounge, with joint support from a local prog-rock band called I Am Your Shadow. Four skinny, denim-jacketed guys just out of high school, who travelled with them on the truck to Kansas City, instigating a complex all-night poker game that culminated with the band’s eighteen-year-old bassist, George, requisitioning almost every last cent from Graham, Ivor, and Kit.

  In Denver, under the ragged, white-capped outline of the Rockies, they played the Coliseum, and came off stage to find a familiar face waiting for them: Jonah Hills, up from Albuquerque in a battered black ’58 Chevy Impala. They embraced with the fervour of long-lost friends: neither Cass nor Ivor had heard from Jonah since he’d slipped their demo to Martin Hartford the previous year.

  “Only been on the road for seven hours,” he said, offering Ivor a lopsided grin as Cass threw her arms around him. “No distance for old friends.”

  Over steak and mashed potatoes at an all-night café, Jonah told them he’d moved to New Mexico for the sunshine, and a dancer named Sylvie, whom he’d met on a Caribbean cruise. (He’d been playing guitar in the house band.) Not long after the ship had docked in Louisiana, Sylvie had discovered she was pregnant; she’d wanted to move home to Albuquerque to have the baby, and Jonah had agreed to go with her. But just a few weeks after the child was born—they’d called him Todd—Sylvie had left, taking the boy with her.

  Now, he suspected that Todd might never have been his; that what Sylvie had been after, really, was a down-payment on an apartment. (She’d also skipped town with the slender envelope of dollars Jonah had been saving for that purpose.) Where she was now, he had no idea: she’d sent a postcard from Las Vegas, with a single word—“sorry”—and had not been in touch again. Her parents, who had rather taken a shine to Jonah, were none the wiser, either.

  “So there I am, stuck in Albuquerque, with no girl, no son, and barely a dollar to my name,” Jonah said, another, weaker smi
le easing the weathered contours of his face. “But hey—at least I still have the sunshine.”

  He was still playing guitar, he said: just local places, for tips and a free meal.

  “Nothing like this.” He looked from Ivor to Cass. “Don’t forget me, will you? Don’t forget who brought the two of you together.”

  It seemed so long ago, now, that she had seen Jonah coming up the drive at Atterley, his steel guitar strung across his shoulder. How strange, how inconceivable, that such a moment could lead to this one: the three of them in a Colorado café at midnight, eating, talking, remembering the past. “How could we ever forget?”

  They asked Jonah to come with them to California—they were starting the long drive in the morning—but he declined.

  “Got to see a man about a dog,” he said. It was three A.M., and they were standing in the parking-lot outside the café. Jonah was half-cut on bourbon—not to mention the several toots Ivor had slipped him in the men’s room—but he insisted on driving straight back to Albuquerque.

  “Come and crash at the motel with us, Jonah,” Cass said. “Drive home tomorrow.” But he shook his head; his expression was glazed, remote. “I’ll drop you guys off, and then get on the road.”

  At the motel—a low-slung clutch of red-roofed buildings just off Route 70—Jonah stopped the Chevy, waited for them to get out, and then sped off, his hand waving through the open driver’s window. Ivor and Cass stood together on the tarmac, watching the fading tail-lights of his car.