by Clare Empson
‘There’s never an ideal solution, it’s always some kind of sacrifice.’
Walking along Camden High Street, minutes away from the gig, I broach the subject of how Alice and I should refer to each other. I can’t ask her to lie about our relationship. But full disclosure will trigger unbearable interest, which neither of us wants.
‘So, I was thinking of introducing you tonight as a friend, if that’s OK?’
‘Friends is what we are, Luke,’ Alice says, smiling at me.
I feel the release in my body, a slight loosening of my limbs, and it’s only then that I realise how much tension I have been carrying. It’s not a straightforward thing, the introduction of my secret birth mother to a gathering of colleagues I see day in, day out.
The pub is packed and already I spy a hefty sprinkling of A&R men, circling around the bar. On the surface, back-slapping and man-hugging and exchanging news, but beneath that, each man is clenched with the desire to win. There’s so much pressure in A&R. Sign an act that goes stratospheric and you secure the entire record company’s future; that’s everyone from the packers in the warehouse to the designers in the art department. Everyone treats you like a god. Waste money on a flop and you’ve the prowess of a donkey.
It’s a relief to catch sight of Ben at the bar.
‘Thank fuck,’ I say. ‘I wasn’t sure you’d come.’
‘Problems?’
‘Just my own weirdness.’
With me and Ben there’s never any need to explain. We take three beers over to the corner, where Alice, I see to my horror, is talking to Gareth the accountant. Gareth is in his fifties and he has an unchanging gig uniform: plain round-neck white T-shirt, jeans that are not definitely made of denim and may well be elasticated. Not that it matters. The problem with Gareth is twofold: he’s intensely boring – a job prerequisite, you might say – and woefully lecherous. And Alice is clearly in his sights. Christ, this I really didn’t need tonight.
‘Hello, Luke,’ says Gareth, though he doesn’t take his eyes off Alice. ‘Just been chatting to your lovely friend.’
Alice hugs Ben and asks after Elizabeth.
‘Working late, catching up on her notes. She wanted to come but she’s snowed under.’
‘There’ll be plenty more times, I’m sure. Luke says the band are amazing.’
When Alice’s phone rings moments later, I can tell from her tone of intimacy that the caller is Rick.
‘That’s a shame,’ she says to me. ‘I was hoping Rick would come, but he’s in the middle of something, working late.’
As she goes to put her phone away, it slips out of her hand and lands face down on the floor.
‘Oh shit,’ she says, as I crouch down to pick it up. ‘Is it cracked?’
I turn the phone over in my hand and examine it, and I feel the cold creep of dismay. For her screen saver is a picture of Samuel I’ve never seen before. Why is there a picture of my baby on her phone? And if she’s going down that route, shouldn’t it actually be one of me? For a moment I’m too shocked to speak and I don’t even know why.
‘Isn’t that your baby, Luke?’ Gareth asks, and Alice and I speak at the same moment.
‘Yes, I look after him while Luke and Hannah are at work.’
‘Alice is my birth mother.’ The surprising admission slips out. ‘She’s Samuel’s grandmother.’
There’s a tense little moment of silence while Alice and I stare at each other, heat rising in her cheeks.
‘Uh-oh, cat’s out of the bag,’ Ben says.
‘It is rather,’ Alice says, but she’s smiling. ‘We’re still getting used to it. And actually, Gareth’ – he looks thrilled that she’s remembered his name – ‘it’s meant to be a secret. Luke’s mother doesn’t know yet. So we’re keeping it quiet.’
‘My lips are sealed,’ Gareth says. ‘And let me tell you, you look nothing like a grandmother.’
It’s the moment of levity we need.
‘I’ll catch you all a bit later on,’ Alice says, grabbing the opportunity to move away. ‘I’m not good in crowds. I’ll probably stand at the back.’
Reborn aren’t due on for another ten minutes, but it’s already impossible to get anywhere near the stage. Time Out ran a feature last Friday; I guess that’s how the punters have got hold of it. I think, momentarily, about the band in the dressing room. Wonder if they’re nervous or revelling in their moment in the sun. While I wait, I exchange nods with the other A&R men, all of whom I know. There’s an unspoken code at a gig like this, one where we are all fierce competitors – every label wants to sign Reborn, though only three or four of us have the money – and it’s nonchalance. If conversations must be had – and we’re all keen to avoid them – the subject matter is kept light and brief. I spy Joel Richardson, boss of Universal, in a corner, flanked by two of his A&R guys, Matt and Tommy, both friends of mine, if that’s what you’d call our nights out on the lash. Pre-Hannah days, Friday nights that might start at a gig and move to a club, then someone’s flat to see in the dawn. Too much booze, too many drugs, hangovers that destabilised me even then. Good times that felt in retrospect like anything but.
Ben and I are standing in the middle of the crowd, jostled and jarred from every side, toes stepped on, elbows in backs, the slosh of spilt beer as it lands like raindrops on my jeans. I’m happy here, a few rows back from the mosh pit but up close enough to see, feel, immerse myself in the act. No place for a chat, but I find myself shouting above the noise anyway.
‘Did you think it was weird that Alice had that picture of Samuel on her phone?’
‘Weird how? She’s looking after him all day. Of course she’s going to take pictures.’
‘You’re right. I’m the weirdo. I forgot.’
Ben laughs. ‘Alice is in for a shock when she finds out what you’re really like.’
The band are about to come on; there’s a surge, a momentum, both the pushing as the crowd tries to pull closer and the palpable energy of expectation. How many people in this tiny room? A hundred and fifty at most. Yet as the band walk out – Daniel, the lead singer, first, then Arlo the drummer, Ingrid the guitarist and finally Bex on bass – it’s the cheer of a stadium. Straight into their first song, ‘Special’, a punky electro number that is a guaranteed hit, I’d say.
The first three songs are classic Reborn, emotional turbulence and political rant hidden in a skilful wrap of classic songwriting. Then they surprise the crowd with new material – a song I’ve never heard before and one that has veered into unapologetic disco – and an extraordinary thing happens. Halfway through, I realise the audience is dancing. A&R men don’t dance. A bit of gentle nodding at most, foot-tapping if you must. So this feels kind of momentous. I glance across at Universal, still clustered together, a trio of men, and see that even Joel Richardson is swinging his hips and padding the air with his palms, an enthusiastic post-rave gesture that is almost endearing.
The band leave the stage after exactly thirty minutes to overwhelming rapture. It’s no longer a question of whether they will be huge, or even when; their fame is here, their moment has come.
The bar is rammed, of course, and it takes Ben and me a good ten minutes to get served, all the time looking around for Alice. How can someone as conspicuous as her – tall, head-turningly good-looking – have evaporated like this? I wonder if she abandoned the gig halfway through.
‘How can Alice have just disappeared?’ I say more than once. ‘Do you think she bailed?’
‘Mate,’ Ben says, ‘you’re alarming me. Just relax about Alice, OK? She’s a grown-up. She does her own thing. And she probably doesn’t get off on pints of beer being chucked all over her.’
Alice appears from nowhere just as we’ve got our drinks, and Ben passes her his beer.
‘Have this,’ he says. ‘I’ll go and get another one.’
‘Oh, n
o need. I’m off now. Just wanted to say goodbye. And, Luke, the band are fantastic. You’re really on to something. I can see why you’re excited about them.’
‘Won’t you stay for a quick drink? I’ve hardly seen you. Where were you standing?’
Ben is staring at me intently, probably trying to communicate the integral message of ‘be cool’, as he has so many times before.
‘At the back. I get panicky if I can’t find my way out.’
‘Well at least let me walk out with you to say goodbye.’
‘Don’t worry about that. You’ll want to talk to the band, won’t you? Don’t miss your chance. We’ll catch up when I come next week.’
‘Do we need to have words?’ Ben says when Alice has gone, our catch-all phrase for when one or other of us (usually me) is losing our shit.
‘I can’t help being a bit needy. I’m an adoptee.’
‘With two brand-new flesh-and-blood parents and one extremely loving adoptive mother. Don’t make this harder than it needs to be.’
‘You’re right,’ I say. ‘I know you’re right.’
‘You know what Elizabeth would say right now? Boundaries, my friend. Alice has them, but you don’t. We all need boundaries.’
Then
Alice
We glide down the King’s Road in Robin’s open-top car, a shining cream and silver work of art that draws cheers and yells of appreciation from pedestrians and hoots from other drivers.
‘E-type Jag,’ Jake says, incredulous that I don’t know. ‘The most beautiful car ever made.’
We have borrowed Robin’s car so that we can drive to Essex to have lunch with my parents, more of an order than an invitation. When I rang home to ask if they’d post my passport, my father said, ‘If you’re planning on going to Italy with some youth we have never met, think again. You can come and get it yourself.’
My mother wrote to me the same day and I spied her round, girlish handwriting with the same pit of gloom that accompanied most of my childhood. Her missives, dictated by my father, have been chequering my life since I started at boarding school.
We thought you might have the decency to introduce your new boyfriend to your family. We haven’t heard from you all term. Come for lunch on Sunday.
Driving out of London along the Bayswater Road, lined with its cheerful display of bad art, clunky nudes and one-dimensional still lifes proudly tacked to the railings, T. Rex turned up to distortion volume on the car stereo, I feel I’ve never been happier.
But the moment we turn off the A12 and begin the approach to my village, past the house where I took Scottish dancing lessons as a child and the courts where I learned to play tennis, past Huskard’s, the grim-looking old people’s home with its barred top windows, I become twelve again. Frightened of my father, ashamed of my mother, her weakness, her cowardice, her lack of self-respect. I suppose I love her in some far-off way, but she never once stood up for me; she watched my father berate me for kicks and allowed her silence to be his accomplice.
‘You’re quiet,’ Jake says, reaching out to take my hand. ‘How bad can it be?’ but I can’t find any words to answer him.
‘Christ, you didn’t tell me you lived in a mansion,’ he exclaims as we turn into our drive.
‘We only own part of it,’ I am still too choked for proper conversation.
It is a vast and beautiful house, mostly red brick, with black and white gables and three tiers of long, thin windows running across its facade. It was bought as a whole by my grandparents in the fifties and then carved up, so that we only live in the middle section, a large-roomed, high-ceilinged flat overlooking the rose gardens below. A retired schoolmaster lives in the top flat, originally the servants’ quarter, and a couple of bad-tempered Scottish pensioners inhabit the ground floor, and this, growing up, was my day-in, day-out demographic.
I hesitate at the side door, the entrance to our flat, and consider ringing the bell. But the door is open and I remind myself that I am not a visitor, that this is my home.
‘Hello?’ I call, and my voice sounds thin and false even to myself.
In these last moments, I’m uttering a silent plea. Please can it not go too badly. Please can my father be all right.
The stairs lead to a landing where I would expect my parents to be waiting, but it’s empty.
‘They must be in the kitchen,’ I say, and we follow the smell of roasting chicken down the dark corridor.
‘Smells delicious,’ Jake says, still believing this is a normal family gathering. ‘I’m starving.’
In the kitchen, black and white tiled floor of my youth, both parents are at the Aga with their backs to us.
‘We’re here,’ I say, and my mother turns immediately, a wooden spoon held aloft. I see that she is wearing make-up, lipstick, blusher and eyeshadow, an unusual event in her world. She’s dressed up too, in a bright blue trouser suit, the jacket zipped and belted, an orange silk collar peeking out of the top.
‘Hello,’ she says, holding out her hand.
‘Hi, Dad,’ I say, but my father doesn’t answer; he continues to stir a pan as if he hasn’t heard us.
I see Jake dart his eyes at me and then my mother, trying to gauge the situation. Are we being ignored?
‘Hello, Dad,’ I say, louder this time, and I watch my mother slide her eyes away from me; she’s not going to help. She doesn’t offer Jacob a drink – always my father’s domain; if he doesn’t give her a glass of wine then she goes without. She stands with her gaze averted, as though she’s fascinated by the rose bushes below.
Eventually, perhaps only a couple of minutes later, though it feels longer, my father turns around. He is smiling, if you can call it that, and I see that while he has been making the gravy, he has drunk two thirds of a bottle of red wine.
‘Hello, daughter,’ he says, a name he never calls me. ‘Or perhaps you have absconded from that role? Perhaps you are now emancipated from your parents?’
‘Of course not. Dad, this is Jacob.’
The best recourse when my father is in this mood is to try and move things on, although with four glasses of wine inside him, I’m not optimistic.
‘Good to meet you, Mr Garland.’ Jake extends his hand, which my father ignores. Instead he allows his eyes to travel over Jake in expressionless assessment. I feel him registering the shoulder-length hair, the flowered choker at Jake’s neck, the long bead necklaces I considered asking him not to wear.
‘Well, lunch is ready, come and sit down.’
We are eating in the kitchen, the table already laid with knives, forks and four glasses, although my father doesn’t pour me any wine. He refills his own, and then pours a couple of inches for Jake and my mother. Our boundaries are set; lunch is to be an endurance test.
You throw a new lover into a situation of extreme awkwardness and you see a different side to them. I would never have expected Jake to try so hard with my mother, asking her about the roses in the garden below.
‘I think they are classic tea roses, and perhaps the purple ones—’
My father cuts across her.
‘It’s not our garden.’
‘But you have a garden here? There’s so much space.’
‘Yes. An acre, the other side of the house.’
‘We grow vegetables,’ I say, surprising myself and perhaps my parents with the pronoun. ‘Courgettes and beans, potatoes and carrots, all the usual. We have fruit cages too, with redcurrants, blackcurrants and raspberries in the summer.’
‘My grandparents lived on a farm; I spent a lot of my childhood there. My grandmother grew every vegetable you could think of. They were almost self-sufficient.’
‘Sounds idyllic,’ my mother says, and I feel hot with shame. Jake’s childhood was the exact opposite of idyllic.
‘This trip to Italy.’ My father has no interest in small talk.
‘Who pays for it?’
‘Well, the record label is paying all our recording costs, and we have a sponsor who has rented the house for the summer.’
‘And why does Alice need to be there?’
‘She’s making a series of drawings of the band. Didn’t she tell you? She’s going to have an exhibition at the Robin Armstrong Gallery.’
‘Alice doesn’t communicate with her parents any more,’ my father says, refilling his glass.
I could protest but what would be the point? When I started at art school, I told myself I would ring home once a week. Then once a fortnight, before it slipped to every month. What happened, I think, is that with the space and distance to review my teenage years of repression and isolation, my parents morphed into grotesque caricatures: the tormenting bully, the muted wife. For the first time in my life I was away from them, I could be whoever I wanted to be, and the freedom was addictive. I didn’t want to be reminded of my home life, which became in my head a swirling underworld of doom; it suited me to live as if my parents didn’t exist.
‘Student life is pretty hectic,’ Jake says. ‘It doesn’t leave much time for anything else.’
‘Art school? Swanning around drawing some pretty nude model, you mean? I hardly think so. We wanted Alice to go to Oxford, but she didn’t have the brains.’
There’s a tense little moment of silence. It’s not so much what my father says but the scorn in his voice as he says it. I wonder if perhaps he has hated me all along.
‘Alice has a real gift. Perhaps you don’t know of Robin Armstrong, but he’s a big deal in the art world. I would have thought you’d be proud of her.’
My mother looks down at her plate of food; she’s hardly touched it, and her hands are fluttering around her knife and fork as if she’s forgotten how to use them. Inside me now is just one burning intention. I will never be like her.
We all watch my father draining and refilling his glass. His greed, his selfishness, his sad, old-fashioned patriarchy: it makes me feel ashamed.
