Spin

by Colleen Nelson

  Copyright © Colleen Nelson, 2019

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise (except for brief passages for purpose of review) without the prior permission of Dundurn Press. Permission to photocopy should be requested from Access Copyright.

  All characters in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Cover image: istock.com/Cofeee

  Printer: Webcom, a division of Marquis Printing Inc.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Title: Spin / Colleen Nelson.

  Names: Nelson, Colleen, author.

  Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20190045264 | Canadiana (ebook) 20190045760 | ISBN 9781459744967 (softcover) | ISBN 9781459744974 (PDF) | ISBN 9781459744981 (epub)

  Classification: LCC PS8627.E555 S65 2019 | DDC jC813/.6—dc23

  1 2 3 4 5 23 22 21 20 19

  We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $153 million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country, and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Ontario, through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit and Ontario Creates, and the Government of Canada.

  Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien. L’an dernier, le Conseil a investi 153 millions de dollars pour mettre de l’art dans la vie des Canadiennes et des Canadiens de tout le pays.

  Care has been taken to trace the ownership of copyright material used in this book. The author and the publisher welcome any information enabling them to rectify any references or credits in subsequent editions.

  The publisher is not responsible for websites or their content unless they are owned by the publisher.

  Printed and bound in Canada.

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  Table of Contents

  1 - Dizzy

  2 - Ray

  3 - Dizzy

  4 - Lou

  5 - Dizzy

  6 - Lou

  7 - Dizzy

  8 - Ray

  9 - Dizzy

  10 - Lou

  11 - Dizzy

  12 - Lou

  13 - Dizzy

  14 - Ray

  15 - Dizzy

  16 - Lou

  17 - Dizzy

  18 - Lou

  19 - Dizzy

  20 - Ray

  21 - Lou

  22 - Dizzy

  23 - Lou

  24 - Dizzy

  25 - Lou

  26 - Dizzy

  27 - Ray

  28 - Lou

  29 - Dizzy

  30 - Lou

  31 - Dizzy

  32 - Ray

  33 - Lou

  34 - Dizzy

  35 - Lou

  36 - Dizzy

  37 - Lou

  38 - Dizzy

  39 - Ray

  40 - Dizzy

  41 - Ray

  42 - Lou

  43 - Dizzy

  44 - Lou

  45 - Dizzy

  46 - Ray

  47 - Dizzy

  48 - Lou

  49 - Dizzy

  50 - Lou

  51 - Dizzy

  52 - Lou

  53 - Ray

  54 - Dizzy

  Acknowledgements

  For Rory Charles and Kate Georgia

  - 1 -

  Dizzy

  I slid the record out of the sleeve. The pressed plastic flashed like an oil slick. I’d been around records my whole fifteen and a half years, but I still loved the satiny shine of them. I held the unmarked record up when Dad came into the office. “Do you know who this is?” I asked him. Our record store, The Vinyl Trap, was slow for a Saturday. I’d retreated to the office at the back of the store looking for something to listen to.

  Dad shrugged and nodded at the turntable on his desk. “Put it on. Let’s find out.” The couch springs creaked when he sat down and propped his black motorcycle boots up on the coffee table. I dropped the record over the pin in the centre of the turntable. With the flick of a switch, it started to spin and I dropped the needle. Seconds later, a sultry powerhouse of a voice filled the room. I peeked at Dad. His eyes were closed and his head swayed with the emotion of the song. It was bare bones, just a piano and the singer.

  The voice was familiar. It would have been to anyone who heard it. Georgia Waters, the world’s most famous singer.

  And my mother.

  The huskiness of her voice was like sandpaper and honey, every note filled with emotion. I watched Dad lose himself in the song. She didn’t need any accompaniment. She had one of those voices that hit, right in your gut, and made you ache along with her.

  “Man, that woman can sing.” Dad sighed when the song ended.

  “Yeah,” I agreed quietly and lifted the needle off the record.

  “I think she was pregnant with you when she recorded that song.”

  “Why’d you hide it away?” I stood up and dug through his desk drawer until I found a marker. In block letters, I wrote GEORGIA WATERS on the sleeve.

  “Wasn’t hiding it, just forgot I had it.” Dad’s gravelly voice sounded like his mind was somewhere else. With greying hair, left long and shaggy, and the chunky silver rings that covered his fingers, it was obvious he wasn’t the khaki-button-down-briefcase kind of dad other kids had. One arm was covered in tattoos: a saxophone, some music notes, my brother’s name and mine swirled up his ropy-veined forearm, just above a stack of braided leather bracelets. Georgia’s name had been there, too, once upon a time. Now it was covered with a band of music notes.

  I looked at him reproachfully. I was never sure where his feelings for her lay. He probably wasn’t, either. The bell over the door chimed, announcing a customer, and Dad stood up. He looked relieved at the interruption. “Hey there,” he called out. “Can I help you?”

  I heard the customer tell Dad that he was looking for a specific record but couldn’t remember the name of the artist or the title of the album. I rolled my eyes at the impossibility of the request, but Dad loved the needle-in-a-haystack hunts: I heard it in a New York City jazz bar in 1996 and have been looking for it ever since. My brother, Lou, and I didn’t have the patience to work with a customer for two hours until the exact record was identified, but Dad did.

  I held Georgia’s record in my hand and glanced at the shelves. Were more of them hidden in Dad’s private collection? Since we were kids, Dad had sworn us to secrecy about who our mom was. He’d explained that if anyone found out, we’d get hounded, like other celebrities’ children. Photographers would hide in bushes and kids at school would want to be our friends just because we were related to Georgia Waters. Keeping it a secret was easy; it wasn’t like Georgia came around very often. I’d only seen her once in the last fourteen years. She’d visited when I was six, and even though Dad told us not to say anything, I’d blurted it out at recess the next day. The girls had laughed at me and called me a liar. I remember getting red in the face and stamping my feet, insisting that it was the truth. They’d started calling me Deliar, instead of Delilah.

  By the time I got to middle school, everyone had forgotten my claim on Georgia. Now that I was in high school, I was just a kid with no mom. Always had been. I’d stopped trying to explain it.

  The ironic part of being abandoned by a famous singer is that she never really went away. All it took was a Google search of her name
and I got two million hits. I knew where she’d had dinner last night, who she had it with, and what time she left the restaurant because the photographs were plastered all over the internet. I could follow her vacationing on a yacht and see pictures in magazines of her arriving at late-night talk shows. She might have escaped us, but we couldn’t escape her.

  I put the record back and made a mental note of its location on the shelf in case I wanted to listen to it again.

  Or not. Maybe it would just sit there, forgotten. Like we were.

  - 2 -

  Ray

  Hard to put my finger on it, how Dizzy looked like Georgia, but she did. Not the face so much as the way she’d look at me or the turn of her head. She’d got her mother’s attitude, that’s for sure. Got a mind of her own. Guess it served Georgia all right; look where it got her.

  Hearing that song out of the blue took me back. I remembered when she recorded it. Her belly stuck out so far, we couldn’t use a standing mic. I had to hold the hand-held in front of her mouth and she sang into it. She was a beautiful pregnant woman, all glowy with love. Least, that’s what I thought it was. She got a big, round belly that I used to rub coconut lotion all over. Said it’d help with stretch marks. Never got much of a chance to find out if it’d worked out or not. She left so soon after Dizzy was born.

  Before Dizzy came, we’d been driving across Europe, playing gigs and soaking up the life; dragging Lou around with us, too, in a VW van. We slept in it for a while, till Georgia got too pregnant. I knew we needed a place to hole up in till the baby came. Switzerland seemed like as good a place as any. We rented a place in the mountains. In the mornings, we’d open the balcony doors and wake up to crisp air and sunshine, me, Georgia, and Lou all cozied up in the one bed. Man, that air smelled good. Like cedar. Then Dizzy came and things kind of changed. Something just went different for Georgia. I could feel it. Saw the look on her face. Like an animal just realizing it’s trapped. Saddled with two kids and barely twenty-two. Think I knew she was leaving before she did. Little bits of her slipped away every day till, finally, all of her was gone.

  I saw the question in Dizzy’s eyes sometimes. More now than before. She was getting to that age, starting to wonder about things. Wished I could tell her what she wanted to know, like why Georgia left and why she never came back. Truth is, I didn’t know.

  The woman who I’d lived with, who I’d loved — that wasn’t the same one that existed now. I can’t say it to Dizzy, but it’d be better if she stopped wondering. Save us all a lot of grief. I knew after that last visit ten years ago that she wasn’t coming back. Her life was a speeding train, not even driven by her anymore. Managers, PR, record companies, they were pushing it uphill, making it chug along. Sure, Georgia was the engine, her talent made the train move, but it couldn’t go anywhere without the wheels and someone to lay the track.

  Guess way back when, I would have given anything for what she had. Every musician dreamed of fame like that, filling stadiums, the freedom to make music, to know that people around the world wanted more of what you had to give. It was a one-in-a-million chance to reach that level of stardom. Sometimes, I could excuse her for leaving us. Deep down, she knew she was destined for that kind of fame. But as a mom with two kids, it would be a harder sell. Record companies want their singers young, unburdened.

  I looked at the turntable in my office. Empty. Dizzy had put the record away. Tucked it back into the shelves. Or had she kept it? Squirrelled it away upstairs in her room? Couldn’t blame her. She didn’t have anything else from her mom. Maybe hearing her voice, that pure, rich sound, would answer some questions for her. She’d hear the ache in Georgia’s voice, the want for something more. It was right there in every note she sang.

  - 3 -

  Dizzy

  If someone studied my mom’s record covers like I had, they might have noticed that we have the same blue eyes that turn into crescent moons when we smile. And the chin was a giveaway, too. Pointy. But it was the hair that set us apart. Dark, auburn red, like embers in a fire. Her hair is always professionally styled, sometimes coiled up like a glamorous movie star’s and other times hanging down in waves. My hair, on the other hand, is a mass of uncontrollable curls. I keep it chin length and springy and can’t be bothered fighting it anymore. My blow-dryer keeps tripping the breaker in our building anyway, so letting it air dry became a necessity, not a choice.

  “Dizzy, dinner!” Dad called to me from upstairs. I’m Delilah by birth, but Lou gave me the nickname when he was a toddler and it stuck.

  “Almost done,” I shouted back. We’d closed early, the lack of customers depressing, but I still had to go through the usual routine of closing up. I finished sweeping the floor and put the broom away. Flicking off the lights, I took a breath and enjoyed the peacefulness of the store in the darkness. All the records organized in their bins, like sleeping children in their beds. I’d tidied the cash desk, counted the float for tomorrow, and unplugged the register. An envelope of cash, thin because it had been so slow, sat in the safe in the office.

  Set back against the wall, close to the door that led upstairs, was the DJ booth. I ran a hand over the knobs. The turntables sat empty beside a small lamp and the setlist from last week. Dad had raised the DJ booth off the floor on a platform — repurposed pallets we’d found in a back lane. The wall behind was hung with black-and-white patterned wallpaper so it sat distinct from the rest of the space, but it wasn’t enclosed. I’d insisted on a crystal chandelier; it was the one girly touch I’d been allowed in my losing battle to class the place up. For a minute, I thought about skipping dinner to spin a couple of records, try a new mix, but my stomach disagreed. I could smell Dad’s famous rib sauce wafting down the stairs. I let my hand drop from the mixer, then draped a sheet over the equipment.

  Our upstairs was like a rabbit warren, lots of small rooms and narrow hallways. It was cluttered with tons of Dad’s touring memorabilia. Framed posters signed by famous musicians hung on the walls. Acoustic guitars, bongos, an antique brass saxophone he’d picked up in Paris, and an autographed banjo all had spots of privilege beside our worn-in furniture. The instruments weren’t decorations; Dad could play all of them. My best friend, Maya, said coming to our house was like a visit to the best flea market ever.

  The kitchen had the same cozy look as the rest of our home. And by cozy, I meant cramped. Behind a door on the one wall were stairs that led to the store and by the other wall was just enough room for a table and three chairs. Dad had taken the doors off the cupboards so the disarray inside was on display. Mugs and plates were stacked on the shelves without rhyme or reason and all the cutlery was dumped into one drawer. It was how Dad rolled. I was used to it, even though some days I would have given anything to be transported into an Ikea kitchen, where everything was white and chrome and drawers didn’t stick when you tried to open them.

  But the bohemian vibe also fit in with our neighbourhood. People thought Dad was crazy to buy a building in such a dodgy part of town. But his risk paid off. As the neighbourhood repopulated, the value of the building grew. Now, instead of rundown hardware stores and greasy pizza joints, there were retail stores and upscale coffee shops. The Vinyl Trap sat among them, a neighbourhood mainstay. A destination. Some of the people from downtown spent an hour on public transit just to check out our store. Touring musicians made a special stop to sign albums and get their picture taken with Dad. Those photos line the wall behind the cash desk.

  Lou was already at the table. He didn’t look up from his phone as his thumbs flew across the keyboard. I waited for Dad to bark at him to put it away. Lou’s wizardry with social media had gotten The Vinyl Trap lots of attention. He’d created a Facebook page, a Twitter account, and the store had a growing Instagram fan base. His Snapchats were legendary. Lou was always thinking up new ways to connect with customers and spread the word about our store.

  Customers contacted us from around the world, looking for rare records thanks to Lou’s webpage.
He’d gotten the store written up in national newspapers as one of the best record stores in the country and figured out ways to make events in the store, like record signings and jam sessions, profitable. In the digital music era, a good ol’ “mom and pop” record store still squeaking by rang of kitschy romance, but our sales had tripled since Lou had started handling the marketing.

  Dad brought over the pot of ribs. Shiny with sticky barbecue sauce, their scent filled up the kitchen. “Smells good,” I said and took a deep breath.

  Lou put his phone down and sat back with a satisfied sigh. “DJ Erika’s back in the city for a show next week. She’s going to play a set at the store.”

  “Seriously?”

  Lou grinned. His hair was closer to Dad’s colour, a nondescript brown. Even though he kept it shaved close to his head and Dad’s was long and shaggy, there was no doubt whose kid he was. Their resemblance made me jealous: same lanky frame and jawline. Same nose.

  Dad looked between us, confused. He wiped his fingers on a paper towel and raised an eyebrow. “DJ Erika?”

  Dad’s music knowledge was extensive but didn’t involve anything electronic. “Erika Vu. She grew up here, went to our high school. She graduated a couple years ahead of me. She’s played at the store before,” Lou told him.

  “She’s amazing,” I said, almost breathless. “When’s she coming?” I asked.

  “Friday. We’ll have her play an early set instead of Jeremy. She’s got to get back to the city for a warehouse gig.”

  Every other Friday, Lou organized a DJ night — the Friday Night Spin. We had good local talent, like Jeremy, but having DJ Erika spin was going to be epic. Watching DJs on YouTube had taught me a lot. I copied how the pros stood at the booth and worked magic with songs and beats, morphing the music into something new, all with the twist of a knob or scratch of a record.

  “Are we paying her?” Dad asked.

  Lou took a heaping spoonful of corn, carefully balancing it across the table and not spilling a single kernel. “She’s taking some vinyl. We have a couple tracks she’s been looking for.”