Mine: ‘A powerful, emotive and sensitively written story about love and loss' Louise Jensen

by Clare Empson

Rick can mimic Gordon perfectly, his soft Anglicised Scottish voice at odds with his bitter personality.

  ‘The man’s a bully. And you’re his victim. We have to find a way of changing that.’

  He glances at my half-full tumbler of gin.

  ‘Drink up, tree girl. We have a gig to get to.’

  There’s time for another drink before the show starts, but the bar is packed full, three hundred drinkers crammed into a tiny space, most of them smoking, the air a greenish grey. Rick holds my hand and hauls me through the crowd.

  ‘’Scuse us. Sorry,’ he says as we tread on feet and squeeze in between couples. And then, five feet from the bar, he stops dead and I smack into him.

  ‘What?’ I ask, but Rick doesn’t answer.

  Perhaps it’s his pheromones, some kind of chemical energy anyway, that makes me look where Rick is looking. Jacob Earl is standing at the bar, two elbows leant on it, a pound note held in one hand. He’s ordering drinks and there seems to be an invisible force field around him, a whole room full of people who can look but not touch.

  He has his back to me, but even that is intriguing, the way his dark, almost black hair curls over the collar of his shirt, the skinniness of his hips in their tight black jeans, his snakeskin boots.

  ‘Wait till he turns round,’ Rick says, and at that moment, Jacob does.

  The face is astonishing, it’s true, a perfect blend of male and female, though not in the Bowie way, for he is even prettier, with his curly hair and big brown eyes, his full lips. Around his neck he wears a flowered choker and several gold chains. His shirt, like in the photo, is open almost to his waist. It’s impossible not to stare.

  ‘Oi, Jacob!’ Rick calls out unexpectedly, and the singer turns around. ‘Get us a couple of ales while you’re there, would you?’

  He does this, Rick, asks for the impossible with an optimistic grin, and people often fall for it.

  ‘All right,’ Jacob says, and he begins to smile slowly in return. ‘Pints or halves?’

  ‘Pints. Please.’ Rick passes over a pound note.

  ‘For your girlfriend too?’

  ‘She’s not my girlfriend,’ Rick says, too fast, and Jacob laughs.

  ‘You sure about that?’

  ‘Positive. This is Alice. I’m Rick. We’re at art school together.’

  ‘Art school? Whereabouts?’

  ‘The Slade.’

  ‘Hey, Eddie. EDDIE.’

  Another man in head-to-toe black turns around from the bar and looks at us without interest.

  ‘These guys are art students,’ Jacob says. ‘They’re at the Slade. You know the Slade, right? The best art school in the country. Remember what we were talking about earlier?’

  ‘Oh yeah.’

  Whatever it was, Eddie clearly couldn’t give a toss.

  ‘So maybe we should talk to them? About our idea?’

  Eddie shrugs. He looks at his watch.

  ‘There’s no time. We’re on in ten.’

  Jacob nods, reluctantly it seems to me.

  ‘You’re right, we should go.’

  He looks at me with a final heart-shattering smile and I return his gaze, heat flooding to my cheeks.

  ‘Well, enjoy the show,’ he says. ‘See you for a drink afterwards?’

  Waiting for the band to come on, the small, dark room now crammed with bodies and pulsing with the collective energy that accompanies anticipation, I am preoccupied with the beautiful singer. I am physically affected by those brief seconds of interaction, stomach tense, heart banging in my chest, whole body framed in some kind of expectation.

  I assume I’m going to like the band, everyone else seems to, but when they finally come out onto the stage, all of them in black, the density of their opening chord – simultaneous drums, guitar and a long-drawn-out vocal – leaves room for nothing else. I am immersed in the music in a way I never have been; my eyes scan each musician – the drummer, the bass guitarist, the backing singers, two girls, one guy – before returning each time, as if magnetically pulled, to Jacob. Never have I seen someone so effortlessly at ease with himself. Singing so close to the mic that his lips almost touch it. Dancing across the stage between vocals, though dancing is not the right word for this strange, hip-swinging side-shuffle. It might look odd on anyone else, but not him, with his pretty-boy thinness and his cool, jerky moves.

  But it is the words he sings that tip me head-first over an invisible line to a place where I can no longer remember a time when Jacob wasn’t the headline in my thoughts.

  The first song, ‘Sarah’, about breaking up with a girl, is the embodiment of sadness. I want to be Sarah, I want to immerse myself in Sarah’s sorrow.

  ‘Does he write his own songs?’ I ask Rick without taking my eyes off the stage.

  Rick laughs, also without shifting his attention.

  ‘Of course. He’s a god.’

  What to say about the next hour, the two of us rapt in sound and visuals and private fantasy? As a whole – an all-male three-piece consisting of singer/guitarist, bass player and drummer, plus for tonight the trio of backing singers – the band seems to exist in permanent frenzy, explosive riffs, each one longer than the last, extended drum solos that are exhausting in their demand for focus. But it’s the quieter moments I like best, the slow, somnambulant drift into ballad, lyrics that pierce the heart with their compelling sadness. For the final, tortured love song, Jacob sits on the edge of the stage, singing into the microphone with his bluesy Americanised voice – honey flecked with gravel.

  He walks from the stage first, one hand raised in salute, guitar slung around his neck – even his casualness is arresting – and then, in turn, the bassist and drummer both take a final solo before following him.

  No encore, just the explosive sound of audience rapture.

  ‘Christ, they’re bloody amazing.’

  ‘His voice,’ Rick says. ‘David Bowie, but better.’

  ‘His face. Mick Jagger, but cuter.’

  Rick raises his brows and tilts his head to examine me.

  ‘And finally,’ he says, ‘the girl made of ice begins to thaw.’

  Now

  Luke

  We live in a four-bedroomed Victorian terrace in Clapham, bought with a legacy from my father. None of our friends live in a house like this, but then our friends still have both parents intact; my father died from spleen cancer two years ago, a hard, horrible ending that left my mother and me alone. Ours has always been the tricky relationship, and now we no longer have my father’s childish jokes and penchant for expensive wine to take the edge off. When my mother discovered Hannah was pregnant after only three months of our being together, she begged us not to ‘make this mistake’.

  ‘Don’t put so much pressure on your relationship when you hardly know each other. I’ll pay for you to go to a private clinic; it’s all so easy these days.’

  Recommending abortion to an adopted person – well, the irony is writ pretty large. Don’t make the same mistake your mother made. There’s that. And then the rather devastating underpinning: kill this embryo, scrape away this nucleus, before it has a chance to wreck your life. Don’t get me wrong, choosing to have a child with Hannah was no mercy mission, a debt repaid for the life I was given (I was born in 1973; abortion was front-street and fully available by then). Simply that the prospect of beginning a life with this cloudy-haired girl, with her pink Cornish cheeks and the optimism that precedes her into every room, was an adrenaline shot to the heart. And I wanted a child, this child, in a way I’d never wanted anything before.

  This afternoon, arriving home after my momentous lunch, the front door is wrenched open even before I have my key in the lock, as if my girlfriend has simply been waiting the other side of it.

  ‘Oh my God,’ she says, grabbing my hand and pulling me into the house. ‘How. Are. You?�
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  The way Hannah cares about me, her concern, her interest, sometimes I feel I can never get enough of it. I try to be nonchalant, never to show how much I crave the full beam of her attention. But inside I’m just like a child. Look at me, Hannah. Look at me.

  ‘I’m good, I think,’ I say, kissing her. ‘Where’s the baby?’

  ‘He’s asleep. Come on, he won’t wake for a while and I want to hear everything.’

  Sitting across the table from Hannah, holding hands, I feel the first small rush of elation. I’ve found my real mother. I like her. I like having her in my life.

  ‘Start at the beginning. What does she look like?’

  How to describe another beautiful woman to your girlfriend? With honesty, I decide.

  ‘She’s tall and dark and sort of amazing-looking. People were staring at her. It was like having lunch with Helena Christensen. And before you ask, no, I do not fancy my own mother.’

  Instantly, Hannah is laughing.

  ‘I’m not surprised she’s beautiful,’ she says, getting up from her side of the table and walking round to mine. She presses her lips to my mouth; a quick pinch to my inner thigh and my groin fires in response.

  ‘Shouldn’t we be making the most of him being asleep?’

  I slide both hands inside her T-shirt, inch by inch moving up her belly towards her breasts.

  ‘Oh God,’ she says.

  What I love about Hannah is that our passion is equally matched. One expert touch and she’ll drop everything, the burn between us mutual and instantaneous. Harder with a baby, of course, especially when that baby sleeps sandwiched between you at night.

  She pushes my hands away.

  ‘Later,’ she says. ‘I need to hear about Alice.’

  I tell her the few details my birth mother shared about her life. She lives in Chiswick, she’s single with no other children, she’s an artist. She paints portraits of pets for rich old ladies.

  ‘What about Richard?’

  Hannah is a diehard Fields fan. We have a print of one of his most famous paintings – The Exhibitionist – on the wall opposite. It’s a portrait of a show-off dancing for her enraptured parents. She’s overweight and dressed in a sequinned purple leotard and top hat; you can tell she isn’t very good by the gawkish positioning of her limbs.

  ‘She and Richard are still best friends. They talk every day, see each other most weeks. She didn’t tell me much about them being together; I got the impression it was just a fling. He’s gay, after all.’

  ‘Do you think he might be up for an interview?’ Hannah has the grace to laugh as she says it.

  At the Sunday Times Culture section where Hannah works, there is an unwritten hit list of ultimate but almost impossible-to-get interviewees. Richard Fields is at the top of that list and Hannah has been trying to get a profile piece with him for years.

  ‘You’re a hard and ruthless woman. Doesn’t my twenty-seven-year heartache mean anything to you?’

  ‘Your heartache is the perfect in. Surely he wants to meet his son? You’ve a lot of catching-up to do.’

  ‘I get the feeling it’s just me and Alice for now. She didn’t mention Rick much. That’s what she calls him, not Richard.’

  ‘Can I meet her?’ Hannah grabs hold of my hands. She kisses one, then the other. Her excitement is so different to mine: pure, uncomplicated. She sees Alice as the plot twist in my story, the beginnings of a mystery solved. ‘We could ask her for lunch. She can meet Samuel. Her grandson.’

  ‘It might be too soon for her,’ I say, thinking it’s definitely too soon for me.

  ‘Did she tell you what happened? Why she couldn’t keep you?’

  ‘Not really. I got the feeling it was too painful for her to talk about. I guess he – Richard – didn’t want to go through with it. They weren’t in love or anything.’

  Hannah smiles and reaches for my hand. The parallels in our stories – albeit twenty-seven years apart – are uncannily similar. Except that we chose to have the baby, to keep the baby, to treasure the baby. I’m sad suddenly for Alice and for myself, for the life we were never allowed to have.

  I remember so well the day Hannah turned up on my doorstep, red-faced from crying. Instantly, I feared the worst. Here it comes, the ending I project over and over. Rejection that burrs in my veins no matter how hard I try to ignore it.

  But it was the exact opposite of what I thought.

  ‘I’m pregnant,’ she said, and it was all I could do not to laugh, for those seemed like perfect, shimmering words to me. I wondered why she was crying.

  ‘Is that so bad?’ I asked her, and she stared at me, confused, for just one moment before her face slid into a grin that cracked my heart in two and we springboarded into a future neither of us had anticipated.

  Then

  Alice

  I love the life drawing class, it’s the highlight of my week. I love Josef, the Spanish model, who sits huddled in his blue dressing gown, waiting for the lecture to finish and the drawing to begin. I love Rita Miller, the life tutor, who speaks so passionately at the beginning of each class and always fills me with renewed confidence for my time here. Gordon King takes me down, Rita Miller builds me back up, week after week. And I also love the fact that within thirty seconds of seeing Josef stark naked, I am able to scrutinise and measure his genitals as if sketching an arrangement of fruit.

  Every week Rita tries to teach us about observation.

  ‘Beginners think freedom is the greatest thing,’ she says. ‘But most beginners don’t have any freedom because they are in bondage to their limitations. Before you can be spontaneous, first you must learn to see and have a command of the language that enables you to express what you are seeing.’

  She flicks her hand towards the small platform at the front of the class.

  ‘Josef, I think we’re ready for you.’

  The life model removes his dressing gown and folds it carefully on the chair before ascending the platform. He drapes himself over a green hessian screen, notes of a crucified Jesus there, a posture that has clearly been pre-designed by Rita. Head turned to the side and tilted down, each arm stretched out, wrists limp, hands dangling. He is rather Jesus-like, with his beautiful, sculptured face, and his thin, impeccably defined body. Flat stomach, those strong, muscular thighs, hands with long fingers, curved now into the position of claws.

  ‘Think about what you see,’ Rita says. ‘Think. Not gawp. I’m not talking about folds of skin or the underlay of bones.’ She points to Josef with a flourish and he gazes back dispassionately. ‘What we’re looking for are those links and underlying patterns, those insights and sensitivities that at first seem hidden. Without observation you have no content.’

  When I look at Josef, I imagine his backstory. A young man who was tempted away from a traditional life in provincial Spain by the wild hedonism of seventies London, a place where sex shops and pornography cinemas and strip shows and prostitutes line the grimy, litter-strewn streets and marijuana is smoked like cigarettes (right now there will be four or five students on the roof of the Slade sharing a joint). Perhaps he is gay. Or he’s ardently heterosexual, here for his promised sexual revolution, in a city where women – drunk, stoned women – dance topless at parties and engage in acts of defiant promiscuity. Perhaps, though, he is neither of these things. Perhaps I just have sex on the brain.

  True to say I went to bed and woke up thinking about Jacob, the beautiful singer with his pencil-thin cheekbones, and the poetry of his songs. Never before has music affected me in this way. Yes, I collect the albums of the day – T. Rex, The Doors, The Rolling Stones (Sticky Fingers, released last year, played so often the grooves of the record have stretched and turned a whitish-grey). But something happened to me as I stood in that densely packed, smoke-saturated room watching Jacob sing of endings and premature goodbyes. I think it’s that I compr
ehended – physically, rather than intellectually – the unity of sound and voice, the notes of each instrument, as though my entire physiology was absorbing it. And still it was more than that. The words Jacob had written, the words he sang, he believed in them, he knew them to be good. Self-assurance was the drug that drew me to him.

  Now when I gaze at Josef I want to import these new sensations from last night, a feeling of longing, lust, envy, admiration. While I draw Josef’s eyes – haunting and mesmeric they seem to me now – I hear Jacob singing his lament to a girl named Sarah.

  The sketch turns out to be the best thing I’ve ever done. This time when the students are told to gather round, it is my drawing they come to see.

  ‘Observation is fed by the imagination,’ Rita says. ‘What Alice has done wonderfully here is capture a sense of character that she can only have imagined. See the look of sadness in Josef’s eyes? A sort of yearning, wouldn’t you say?’

  After class there seems to be some kind of commotion on the ground floor. The high-pitched voice of Muriel Ashcroft, the Slade’s receptionist, shrieks up towards us as Rick and I walk down the spiral staircase.

  ‘I’m sorry, but if you don’t have an appointment then I really must ask you to leave.’

  ‘But I’m here to talk to two of your students about a potential commission.’

  ‘Which students?’

  ‘A girl and a guy; the girl was called Alice.’

  ‘But which Alice? We have two.’

  ‘Oh well, this Alice is very – how shall I put it? She’s a girl that stands out.’

  Rick and I arrive on the ground floor and Jacob Earl is standing there, his whole face breaking into a smile as soon as he sees me. There is no time to prepare, and this first sighting causes another chemical reaction: bones, cells, blood, heart clamouring and craving beneath my skin. And I find that I’m grinning back at him, stupidly I should imagine. If I could freeze one moment in my life, perhaps it would be this.