“I know.” I shrug. “Just a joke.”
“You seeing anyone?” he asks, before immediately falling over his tongue. “I mean, not that it matters. I mean, it’s your business. You don’t have to answer that.”
Bless him. Two albums and a couple of world tours and he’s still the same Tom. Or is he? There’s something about him that’s changed. Before I can figure it out, a “pssst” comes from behind us and we turn to see a pretty pissed-off floor manager beckoning us out from our hiding spot.
“You’re needed in makeup,” he tells me. To Tom, he tuts and says, “You know there is a green room for you to hang in before the show?”
“See you in a bit,” Tom says.
I flip him a peace sign for no discernible reason as I’m dragged off to look beautiful for my brutal trip into the Colosseum. I catch a glimpse of the audience.
The lions are hungry.
* * *
—
The studio audience love the man I hate and are indifferent to the man I love. Whenever Clive Charles opens his mouth, they screech with glee. When Tom and his band played their opening number, the audience shuffled in their chairs, restless and bored.
Did I say I love Tom? It’s because I do. As I watch him from the guest sofa, sitting at the center of the stage, it strikes me for the first time. It’s not just a crush. It may never be reciprocated. But I love him. He’s a beautiful man. Talented. Kind. And I love him more with every second I’m in his presence.
Clive Charles on the other hand can go jump in the nearest septic tank wearing a helmet made of lead. So far, I’ve been largely ignored as he’s tried to make Towerz his new best friend.
Clive pulls his head out of Towerz’s colon long enough to ask the audience, “Are we ready for another song by The Friedmann Equation?” The crowd holler and hoot, but only because their hero is speaking. The couple of times I have spoken since recording began, the audience have laughed in the same way they do for him. I don’t feel good about this.
I have the best view in the world for the next four and a half minutes. As they play, I try to forget about where I am and who I am and how I got here. I think back to Edinburgh and before I got the wrong end of the stick and exploded. I think back to my angry reaction at the airport. My furious hostility on the podcast. You can see the pattern clear as day. It’s a miracle Tom acknowledges my existence, let alone looks genuinely pleased to see me.
As they finish their performance, the punters once again unmoved (bar the small contingent of superfans in Friedmann merchandise in the front row), Clive reads the room.
“The Friedmann Equation, ladies and gentlemen, if that’s your sort of thing.”
The crowd guffaw in reply.
“You got a microphone over there, guys?” he asks the band.
Scott picks one up and turns it on. The tool looks alien in his hand as it screeches out a little feedback. Once it’s under control, Scott offers a meek “Hello. Hi.”
Without missing a beat, Clive asks, “Ever thought of writing some actual songs?”
More sniggers.
As self-deprecating as Tom, Scott says, “It wasn’t our forte. We do have a little announcement though for fans watching, here and at home.” This piques the host’s interest.
“Please, proceed.”
“After careful consideration…we’ve made the collective decision to call it a day. Officially. A farewell tour and then The Friedmann Equation is no more.”
“Hey, that rhymes!” interjects Clive. “Maybe if you’d actually written some lyrics you could keep it going a bit longer.”
My face must be a picture because I see Clive studying it. Looking for weakness. I can’t keep the emotion out. There are extenuating circumstances, but this band’s music means the world to me. Even when Tom’s been a ghost, his music has been by my side. I will miss them so much, and I’m showing it. Clive pounces.
“I thought I just saw Jess Henson’s bottom lip wobble there!”
I have no option but to own it. “I’m a fan. What can I say? They will be missed.”
The band turn to me and take a little bow. It’s a touching moment, immediately ruined by the berk to my left.
“All right, fangirl. Don’t forget to get your T-shirt signed after the show.”
I snap back. “I’ll put it next to the autographed pair of your dad’s panties I have. I got them on eBay for twenty-five cents.”
Clive slaps his desk in merriment. “Zing! I love this chick.” He looks down the lens. “Well, that’s the end of Part Two. Quite a revelation on The Clive Charles Show. Stay tuned because we’ve got tons more. See you after the break.”
32
At Ease
Tom
West Alameda Avenue, Burbank
March 6, 2018
The talk-show host is a loathsome individual. He sneers and looks down on everyone who isn’t earning what he is, completely convinced his success is from his own awesomeness and nothing to do with dumb fucking luck, or the fact that he went to a posh boys’ school and his family had “connections.”
I know for a fact we only got booked on his show because the producer’s daughter is a big fan. In hindsight, announcing our decision to split on this particular program might not have been the best move. At least me and Jess got to sort of share a stage, even if it was just for one night only. I sometimes think there’s an alternative universe (in which I can keep my foot out of my mouth long enough to make a semi-good impression) in which we shared a stage a lot. The Comic & the Band. Jessica Henson and The Friedmann Equation. Touring the world. It’s a nice dream.
I see Clive crack open a beer and pour it into a pint glass (it’s sort of a gimmick of his) and I long to be backstage drowning my sorrows. But we’ve got the closing number to do, and here, well, here I get to see Jess take center stage. She’s finishing up a three-minute routine that’s filthy and offensive and I hypothesize how much will make the final cut. The audience laugh, but I can’t say I’m in love with her material. It’s smart and mean. Clever and nasty. Each to their own, goes the saying, but it’s nothing like the stuff I know she can do. She finishes up to a roar of applause and takes her seat again, ready for the grilling from the host that can make or break someone this side of the Atlantic.
“Jessica Henson? Jess? Can I call you Jess?”
Through shiny teeth she tells him, “I couldn’t care less, Clive.”
“You’re famous for not really giving a crap?”
Jess does a canny, dead-eyed Barbie doll impression, complete with stiff arms and bimbo eyelashes, before delivering the line “I didn’t realize I was famous. Is that what all this is?”
Clive circles again.
“You seemed quite sincere when that band said they were calling it quits?”
Scott mouths to me, “That Band”? I reply with a rude gesture that I hope isn’t picked up by any cameras. Jess looks in our direction and catches my eye.
“Like I say,” she says. “I’m a fan.”
Clive continues. You can see by his body language he’s up to something. Planning something sinister. And then he reveals it. “You do a lot of jokes about your dad in your routine. He left when you were young, right?”
Jess shifts. She’s trying not to show a weakness, but that was an uppercut that’s left her stunned. She emits a meek “He did.”
“Does he ever try and get in touch?”
She sits up, stronger now.
“Occasionally. But I’ve made it pretty clear he can get—”
“Careful now,” Clive interjects.
“Stuffed. Why do you ask? He’s not here tonight, is he?”
As the audience laugh and Jess gains a bit of confidence for the battle ahead, the host looks annoyed. His irritation triggers something in Jess, as she gets an inkling of what’s to come. Cli
ve Charles snickers and looks over to the cronies around him who he pays to laugh.
“Did someone tell her?”
Jess looks like she’s been hit by a ten-ton truck.
“Are you serious?”
“I think we may have found her weak spot!”
I take my eyes off the backstage monitor to see Jess in the flesh. She’s crumbling under the light. The atmosphere in the whole room changes. The audience start whispering to one another. This is what passes for entertainment, is it? Despite her bolshie and confrontational mask, every single person watching can see a scared little girl, blindsided by an abhorrent, bullying man.
Her voice trembles. “So, is he here?”
Clive replies, “We’ll find out after these messages.”
As the feed goes dead, Jess blinks twice, stands up, and marches toward Clive with violence in her eyes. Security preempt any danger and flank the host, who reaches for his pint. Before he can get to it, Jess unclips her microphone, wraps the wires around her battery, and in one swift move she dunks the recording equipment into Clive’s glass. I see the glass smash on impact. I also see Jess quickly hide her bleeding hand.
Before I run off to find her, I ask Scott if he minds being a man down for the final song. He tells me he couldn’t give two shits right now, and lets me know if I don’t go after her, he will.
I follow droplets of blood backstage until I see her burst out of her dressing room, coat in hand. She banks left, running down the corridor, toward the exit. She pushes a fire door and a small alarm sounds. Neither of us pays it much attention as we step out into the bright LA sunshine.
She’s walking too fast for me to keep up and so I have to call out her name. She doesn’t stop walking.
“Jess, please?”
“Seriously, Tom. Now is not a good time.”
I stop, ready and willing to take her at her word and leave. But then she stops too. I catch up to her and ask if I can at least help her sort out her hand. She nods. I usher her into a local burger joint and through to the bathroom in the back. While she runs her hand under a cold tap, I nip out to the bar and ask for their first-aid kit.
The cut isn’t deep. The running water seems to have cleared the blood and stopped it flowing. All that’s left for me to do is wrap her hand with a bandage. I try for a joke to calm the fire raging inside me at the mere touch of her skin.
“Thank God for unisex bathrooms, eh?”
I follow it up by asking her if she’s OK. She nods and replies that she’s fine. Says it was nothing, really. Knowing how many times I wish someone had asked me if I was OK more than once—how honest I might have been if they had—I ask again.
Her face cracks, the facade vanishes. She throws her arms around me. Despite willing this moment into existence many, many times, this is not how I wanted it to be. Even with the Californian heat, Jess is shivering. She takes a step back and wipes her eyes.
“Who even does that?” she asks.
“You want me to go back there and smash his face in?”
“No.” She wipes away a few more tears and laughs through them. “I mean, you’re a big guy, Tom, but you strike me as soft.”
“I’d be offended if it wasn’t true.”
She carries on through the tears, “I bet you punch with your thumb inside your fist.”
I grin, happy to let her tease me. I can be the butt of any joke if it makes someone feel a little better, and right now Jess needs to feel a little better. I take her hands in mine.
“How about I set fire to his house?” I offer.
“You’d probably kill a maid or something by mistake.”
“Might help with the music. That level of guilt.”
“Yeah, but you wouldn’t last a day in Sing Sing.”
“So no to punches in the face. No to arson. Anything I can do?”
She pauses to genuinely consider my very silly question. “If you ever have kids, if they’re boys, raise them not to be arseholes. If everyone did that, we’d have a fighting chance.”
A sadness overcomes her, and she finally lets go of my hands.
“Man, I’m hungry,” she says, a semblance of a plan to move past this awfulness starting to form in her head.
“This place does a crazy-good dirty burger,” I offer as we step back out into the restaurant.
“You’ve eaten here before?” she asks.
“Are you kidding? How do you think I got the first-aid kit so easily? I’m putting the owner’s kids through university.”
I wave at the nearest waiter and he shows us to an empty table at the front. I pull out her chair for her and she sits.
It’s the first time we’ve ever shared a meal.
* * *
—
I feel at home in her presence. Comfortable. At ease. The nastiness of earlier seems to have disappeared, a load lifted from her shoulders. For some reason, I ask her about Chris, the guy she was seeing a year and a bit ago. She tells me they broke up around the same time I got together with Cara.
“We were on our way to a New Year’s party. A load of his friends were over from Australia.” She takes a deep breath. “Just before we knocked on the door he asked me to do him a favor.”
“Which was?” I ask.
“ ‘Be less Jess.’ ”
I nearly choke on my meat, salt, and processed cheese.
“Yeah, well,” she continues. “I knew before that it wasn’t going to be anything long-term.”
“Still,” I say.
She shrugs and takes a bite of her burger. I think about Cara for the first time since we left The Clive Charles Show. “Long-term” certainly doesn’t feel in the cards for us after our last sit-down. Cara said I’ve been overbearing of late and that she needs some space. I don’t tell Jess this for obvious reasons. As if by magic, she asks anyway.
“How are things with you and Little Miss Hollywood?”
I shoot her a look that says Don’t and she immediately apologizes.
“It was a cheap shot. I’m sorry.” She wrinkles her nose, an adorable affectation that I shouldn’t be concentrating on now.
“What?” I ask.
“What do you mean, ‘what’?”
I take a sip of milkshake and tell her, “You do this thing with your nose when you have something you want to say.”
“Oh, I do, do I?”
“You do.”
“Well, what I was thinking was, I apologize to you a lot, you know.”
“I apologized to you first. The Sarah thing, remember?”
“Ha. Yeah!” She squeals as she says it. “That was so lame!”
My face probably looks like it’s chewing a wasp, but inside I’m ecstatic at how happy she is. She continues, dropping from high to low in under three seconds. “But the podcast. That was fully awful on my part. I am so sorry.”
“I’m OK,” I lie.
I realize it’s the first time I’ve openly lied to Jess. It’s a white one, but it comes with a weird feeling. I know she doesn’t need to know how awful it made me feel. How the mention of musicians ending their lives sent me into a tailspin for far too long.
She continues, “If I’d known, I never would have made a joke about that. I shouldn’t have, regardless. It was a dick move. I really am sorry.”
As the waiter returns and asks if we need a top-up, I down the last quarter of my drink and order another. The conversation has me reaching for backup in the form of something stronger. I order that too, and on this, Jess gives me a look. I try to ignore it, but Jess has never struck me as the kind to ignore anything.
“Bad company, am I?” she asks.
“No,” I reply. “Not at all. I just fancied a drink.”
Not many people would be confrontational enough to say, with a smile, “But you’ve already had tw
o.” Then again, many people aren’t Jess.
“That’s right,” I say, through slightly gritted teeth. “I have had two already.”
“Just saying,” she offers, all sweetness and light.
I feel like I’m being teased and tested at the same time. Trying to work her out is an exercise in futility. And the best part about Jess—I never have to wait long before she just straight-out tells me.
“You don’t need it. Right now, I mean. You don’t need it for courage, or for defense, or to help you relax. It’s me. I am me. And you are you. And you is good.”
Almost immediately I make eye contact with the waiter and cancel my drinks. She looks at me as I do this, studying me. I feel like she sees me. Really sees me. The real me.
“You’ve changed,” she says, submitting it like it’s a fact, probably because if it was framed as a question, I’d refute it. I try to turn the focus back onto her by telling her “So have you,” but it doesn’t land.
“Of course I’ve changed,” she says. “Everyone knows I’ve changed. But you. You seem…good. Better. No, ‘good’ was right.”
It takes someone you haven’t seen in a while to make you sit up and notice the change for yourself. I am good. I am better. I want to tell her that she’s played more of a role in that change than she could ever know. That thinking about her, wanting to be someone that’s good enough for her, is what’s made me better. But I know how inappropriate that is. How borderline deceitful to Cara it would sound. And so, I say nothing.
“And this, man. This announcement. You’re really calling it a day?”
“We are.”
“What’s next?”
I see from her manner that talking about me takes her mind off what’s gone before, and so—while “me” was never my favorite topic, I relent. I tell her how even before the band came out here I was sure we were heading for splitsville. I say how I’ve started talking to a filmmaker I like about scoring her next film. As I continue, I notice she’s more perplexed about where I am than I am myself.
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