by Stella Duffy
She then quoted the lines from “I Know You”. “See, the real words are ‘I know what you look like, beneath the dress, I know how you feel, dressing to empress’—with an ‘e’—that’s a very Alex line, you don’t know what he’s fucking talking about unless you read the lyrics. Then there’s some other stuff, blah, blah, blah … ‘bitch’. That’s it.”
Siobhan threw away her apple core and grimaced, “Bitch of course rhymes with witch; the boys weren’t quite as eloquent in the early days as they are now. Then it stops rhyming altogether and becomes this really fast, furious rant which I sing, if I do say so myself, fucking brilliantly.”
Then she sang it and, sitting at her feet on the attic floor, Saz understood why that voice had made so many people tout Beneath The Blonde as the future. Siobhan’s fierce, atonal scream made the hairs on the back of her neck stand on end as she launched into the last few lines—”I know you, I know what you feel like, I know you. Beneath the blonde. I know you. Beneath the hair. Under the dress. I know you. Under the underneath. Under the skin. Under you. I know you.”
When she’d finished, she sank beside Saz onto the floor and swallowed a long draught of her vodka. “Then there’s this really long pause with just a drum beat and it ends with me whispering, ‘Don’t forget it, bitch’. Which is, of course, where the early dyke rumours came from.”
Saz grinned, “So they are just rumours?”
“Primarily. Certainly there’s been no chance, or desire for that matter, since I’ve been with Greg. Sorry.”
“Don’t be, I’m practically married too. It’ll disappoint my exgirlfriend though.”
“It’s not that I wouldn’t, or that I haven’t. Dabbled, you understand. But I’m with Greg. I love him.”
Siobhan reached into the fridge and took out another vodka for them both.
Saz accepted hers readily and asked, “So why is it ‘bitch’? Why didn’t they choose a boy word?”
“Alex had written it about a girl he’d been going out with, and he originally meant for it to be sung by both me and Dan. Like a duet for two people breaking up—all that bitterness and nastiness. I thought it was a great idea, even if it did come from Alex.” Siobhan shrugged her shoulders and pulled herself back up on the chaise, “You know, a duet version of what you walked into this morning. Only Greg and I aren’t breaking up, we just always fight over trivia.”
“We don’t call six hundred pound phone bills trivia in our house.”
“Neither does Greg. So anyway, me and Dan dueting was a good idea, but when it came to the recording, I got on much better with the arrangement than Dan and the last bit, all that ranting and then the drum and the whisper just sounded so much stronger with only my voice.”
“Didn’t Dan mind?”
“Yeah, sure. But nobody would actually go out of their way to pick a fight with Alex if they could help it, so the rant was mine and we left it as ‘bitch’ because it was better that way. The record company wanted me to whisper ‘bastard’ but that was pathetic. Bastard sounds too nice. Bitch sounds mean.”
“Going by the words of the song, Alex sounds mean too. Or was he just horribly hurt?”
“Oh no, Alex is, well, nasty—in a funny sort of way, you understand. But in this case he was horribly hurt as well. Alex has this unfortunate habit of falling in love with women who turn out to be gay. Not when he meets them—just when they leave him.”
“Ouch.”
“He thinks so.”
“Has it happened much?”
“Only twice to my knowledge.”
“But twice too many?”
“Yeah, maybe. I don’t know. Alex is just an angry shit anyway. You know, he’s Greg’s mate and I do like him and everything—I mean, it feels like I’ve known him for forever. We’ve worked together for long enough now and he does write fantastic stuff for me, but, well, it’s like he’s only really happy if he’s got something unhappy to obsess about. He’s a really good writer but he’s even better at being a moody git. Which, to be honest, is fine with the rest of us really, ‘cos on the rare occasions he’s in a good mood he writes fuck all.”
By the time Siobhan had explained all the references in the letters, listed the several three am telephone calls where the caller just hung up, and showed her the three bunches of now dried yellow roses, their cards simply reading “I Know You”, they had finished another two vodka miniatures each and Saz was feeling like she’d better get out of that warm room soon or the concept of coming to work the next day would be more painful than morning usually necessitated. Molly, who was at home preparing dinner for the select gathering they were expecting that night, wouldn’t be too impressed either. But to clarify her thoughts and what Siobhan expected of her, she went over it once again, retying the laces on her boots with clumsy fingers.
“You’ve had two letters in the past month?”
Siobhan nodded.
“And they’re both postmarked WC1?”
“Which is where our record company’s offices are.”
“True. But it’s also where very many other London offices are. And while they read like letters from a man, we mustn’t discount the possibility they may be from a woman. They’re definitely from someone who knows your work well.”
Siobhan giggled, her dimples flashing in the perfectly smooth makeup free skin, “Someone who knows it better than you do, yes.”
“And no one knows about the letters except Greg?”
Siobhan stopped laughing at this and sat herself up on wobbly arms.
“Yeah, and I meant what I said about not mentioning them either. I told Peta, our PA, that you’re not very experienced as a production person. I said you were a friend of a friend who needed work and we’d offered to give you some office stuff to do. I just want you to suss it all out. If you need time to go off and check up on things, or do any of that detective following stuff—”
Saz shook her head, thinking of the rain falling outside, “I tend not to do a lot of ‘following stuff if I can possibly help it, but I know what you mean.”
“Right, so just let me know and we’ll say you’re doing something for me or Greg. But I don’t want any of the others to know why you’re really here. I think it would be … I don’t know, bad for group morale or something. These letters are crap but that’s all they are. Just letters. So far anyway. Hopefully it’ll stay that way and we’ll have bothered you for nothing.”
“Do you really think it’s nothing?”
“I’m not as worried as Greg. He kept pushing me to tell the police about it, but I just can’t stand the thought of that lot prying into our lives, so I settled for the next best thing. Chick detective, just like in the movies.”
Saz stood up, “I hope not. The ones in the movies tend to get beaten up with alarming regularity.”
“Yeah, but they always bounce back, don’t they?”
“That’s why they’re in the movies. So you really don’t care about any of it? Not even the phone calls?”
“I do care. I don’t like it, but then again one part of me actually thinks it’s quite cool.”
“Cool?”
“Yeah, you know. Makes us real. Like a proper band. With a stalker and everything. But I … well, Greg and I, we value our privacy. In a way, it’s exciting and on the other hand, it’s just another bloody intrusion. I expect the press to want to know about us—I think I’m almost prepared for how it’s going to be if the next album does even better—but the guys can be such arseholes sometimes.”
“How do you mean?”
“Nothing really, I do love them, the men, but I really don’t need them to start getting on my case about … well, about anything. Alex is always such a grumpy shit and just at the moment he’s being particularly bad. Steve’s a honey but even he’s a worrier at the best of times and Dan’s just broken up with Jeremy. I’m well aware that promoting the new album and getting the tour together is going to be more than enough work, a lot more fuss. I just don’t want to bother them any more tha
n I need to.”
Saz nodded. “Ok, if that’s how you want it, it’ll be our little secret. Just don’t expect me to win PA of the month, that’s all.”
Siobhan showed Saz out and gave her a quick hug at the door, then Saz ran out into the rain and Siobhan wandered into the kitchen to rummage through the cupboards and find something sweet and tasty with which to placate Greg.
Saz decided to walk the fifteen or so minutes home, the sharp wind and slowing rain would sober her up and give her a chance to buy Molly some flowers to make up for being no help with the dinner. It would also give her a chance to work out why she didn’t quite believe Siobhan’s protestations about wanting to keep Saz’s real job secret from the boys. Or rather, she certainly believed the protestations, what she didn’t believe were Siobhan’s reasons. Either Siobhan was a control freak who needed to keep all information to herself or there was something she wanted to hide from the others. Saz was looking forward to finding out—tactfully, of course. She was also looking forward to Molly’s broccoli and stilton soup with Delia’s sage and onion bread and quickened her pace up the hill.
EIGHT
In the early seventies Gaelene and Shona used to spend most of the summer holidays down at the beach with Shona’s cousin John and the rest of the family who gathered around Aunty Ruby’s place for the summer. The two little girls had already been best friends for nearly three years. Kindergarten and Primers, now waiting through the summer to go on up to the Standards. Big kids nearly. Their birthdays were two days apart and on the day that Gaelene’s mum had brought her to kindy for the first time Shona, with a whole two days’ more experience in the ways of the sandpit and the Library Corner, was given the important job of “being Gaelene’s friend”. A job she’d taken seriously for almost half her tiny life. Summer holidays, before the advent of skin cancer and burn times and sun block, meant long days swimming and running from the sea to the estuary and back again, panting out their feverish six-year-old energy with only huge sandwiches of homemade bread and big blocks of dairy factory cheese to sustain them until the tide went out. From the flattened, damp shore they would dig for pipis that Ruby and Wai cooked into fritters, the kids eating handfuls of them in the back garden. Ruby always refused to let them take the fritters back to the sea, saying it wasn’t fair to show the baby pipis sleeping in their closed shells under the sand what had happened to their mums and dads.
Gaelene and Shona had far more in common with John and the other Maori kids, whose dads worked in the forest and whose mums worked on factory floors all over town, than with most of the other kids at Sea View Primary with their Choppers and their skateboards and their patent leather shoes. Gaelene and Shona didn’t think they were any different to all the other kids at Ruby’s. Shona and John were first cousins because John’s mum and Shona’s dad were brother and sister and when John’s uncle on the other side had married Selma—Scottish, Arawa and Tuhoe—with family stretched down the East Coast all the way to Te Kaha, Shona and John’s family had just been glad of the extension of their own—for a start, it helped with the babysitting.
Anyway, summer holidays lasted a long hot six weeks, the ocean gave up pipis and mussels and paua for free and if none of the kids was quite sure if she was their aunty or their great-aunty or their great-great-aunty, Ruby didn’t seem to care. She was happy to welcome whoever John brought home with him; her daughter’s nephew was a sweet boy and she knew there were no mums at the other kids’ houses to make them lunch and check that the sun didn’t burn too hard into their little freckled white shoulders. Anyone was welcome at her place, just as long as John reminded those Pakeha kids to take off their shoes before they came in the house.
At six, Gaelene and Shona were as interested in John’s Maori ancestry as they were in the Irish heritage that gave Shona her green eyes and black hair or the older Danish generations that bred Gaelene’s white blonde locks and darkly tanning skin. By the time the girls were sixteen though, New Zealand had just about stopped kidding itself that it was the godzone melting pot and prejudice was only to do with who you supported to win the Ranfurly Shield. And by the time he was eighteen, John had been Hone for three years and New Zealand was starting to name itself as Aotearoa. In the blinding summer of ‘71 though, the name changes to come didn’t mean a whole lot to a bunch of little kids who swam together in waves higher than their heads.
But they would.
NINE
Siobhan greeted Saz at the front door on Tuesday morning, flushed and sweaty from an hour spent with Elle Mac-pherson, and directed her through to Peta’s office. Saz walked into the room, her mind concerned with the usual debate of whether or not Siobhan had already come out for her and if not, when would be the best time to do it for herself. She’d tried to get an answer to the coming-out question by bringing it up at dinner the night before, but the resulting conversation had been no help at all. Molly maintained that immediate and frank assertion of one’s sexuality was vital, while their friends Helen and Judith held to a mainstream line of telling people only as much as they had to know. As Molly said later, perhaps Helen and Jude’s long years in the police force had made them a little more circumspect than was absolutely necessary. Carrie and her new lover Blair seemed surprised that anyone thought a world might exist where people didn’t automatically know the two of them were dykes. That Blair was wearing a too tight T-shirt, perfectly outlining her surgically perfect breasts and reading “cute baby dyke” and that Carrie had not managed to move her lips from Blair’s body for the entire month of their relationship, meant that neither of them could quite envisage a world where people might not be able to tell their sexuality at a fifty-pace glance. As the only straight couple at the table, Molly’s exgirlfriend Elaine and her new Brazilian husband added their belief that all people should be out all the time, drawing accusations of “You can’t know how hard that is” from Carrie. Equally forthright, and to Molly’s smirking joy, Albert then took the opportunity to enlighten Carrie that not only had the forty-two-year-old Elaine been gay—and out—for most of her adult life, until she’d surprised herself by falling in love with him, but that he’d actually had a boy lover of his own at high school. The conversation then degenerated into an alcohol-fuelled debate about just where was the dividing line between straight and gay, finishing up with confirmed dykes Judith and Helen looking on in amazement as Carrie finally admitted to having enjoyed more than a few men in her time and Blair telling Carrie that she was glad to hear it, because she had an ex-husband of her own hiding in her Cardiff closet. None of which gave Saz any insight on how to deal with her own introduction to Peta, but did give her and Molly a chance to congratulate themselves on having fed and watered such an interesting array of sexualities, congratulating themselves even more when they finally managed to get rid of them, sometime close to three in the morning.
Saz, then, had approached the office with little sleep and mounting interest only to find that her fears were groundless when the tiny white-skinned, red-headed woman stood up from behind her desk, greeting her with a smile, an outstretched hand and the first surprise of the day. “Hi. I’m Peta. I’m twenty-three, I’m single and I’m gay. Have you had breakfast?”
Saz’s second surprise in her new “office” job came when Peta asked her how she liked her coffee. Saz had suffered more than the usual variety of temping jobs before setting up her own business. She managed most for no longer than a month or so, but even in her best temp job where she’d actually been given real work and trusted to get on with it unsupervised, she’d also been expected to make the coffee, to run out and fill meters with twenty pence coins and to open the post as if that task was actually valuable and couldn’t be performed by anyone with half a brain. She wasn’t used to the person who was ostensibly her boss offering coffee and she certainly wasn’t used to that offer being followed up with morning snack sandwiches of waferthin, honey-smoked turkey slices on fresh ciabatta and just a touch of Peta’s homemade cranberry and orange reli
sh to liven them up.
Saz enjoyed working with Peta. She enjoyed it so much that, after the first hour, she almost forgot why she was supposed to be there as she scoffed at Peta’s long-winded stories of her sexual exploits, tales delivered in a shouted Cork brogue over the booming Aretha Franklin and Gladys Knight Peta had chosen to accompany their work. Peta showed Saz around the basic filing system and a rather less basic computer.
“I adore technology, Saz. I forced Siobhan and Greg to go on the net when they moved into this house and set up this office—everything to my specification. You can’t imagine how much simpler it’s made things like liaising about tour dates.”
Saz, who could only just cope with receiving her itemized phone bill, let alone deal with being e-mailed, certainly couldn’t imagine how it could make anything simpler to throw more technology at it, merely nodded an appearance of enthusiasm while making a mental note to go through all the old-fashioned files, the ‘paper junk’ as Peta disparagingly called it, to check any fan letters against the letters Siobhan had received. She also checked her enthusiasm for Peta long enough to ask her a few pertinent questions about her relationship with Siobhan, but the fulsome answers and Peta’s obvious devotion to the band in general and Siobhan in particular meant she placed Peta very low on her early suspect list. As did the fact that while Peta was single, she was certainly not celibate and her frank description of her varied sexual exploits over the past couple of months meant that Saz couldn’t imagine Peta having time to go out shopping for yellow roses, let alone finding the energy to have them secretly delivered.
The morning passed in dealing with fan letters, several calls to the tour manager’s office to check dates and times for press interviews and, for Saz, the slightly more onerous task of working out who was who. Between the tour manager, the tour promoter and the several other people ringing every five minutes claiming to be something to do with the management of the band, she was finding it all rather confusing. Peta called a lunch break at two in the afternoon and went down to the kitchen to reheat the carrot and lentil soup Greg had made that morning. She came back with the news that Alex and Dan had arrived and were just waiting for Steve to join them and if Saz wanted to meet the lads before they retired to the basement until the early hours of tomorrow, she’d better grab them in a hurry.
