by Louise Voss
Geoff was a weaselly, gummy sort of man, skinny and loose in his jeans in a manner indicating underendowment. We’d never really got on; his deputy program director, Gus, had originally hired me for an evening shift, so I wasn’t one of Geoff’s “people.” Plus Geoff had obviously never thought that in just a few months I’d build up such a big following. Eventually, when the slot had come free, he’d been pressured by Gus, the other board members, listeners, and production staff to promote me to the coveted breakfast show, where I’d worked to prove myself day and night: researching, broadcasting, writing, taking hardly any time off.
My “trademark” as a DJ was to take requests on air from the public, but I would play their selected record only if they could give a valid reason for why it was so important to them. What they were doing when they heard it, what they’d felt, wore, ate, touched, said, and why this was memorable.
I was tough, too. My listeners knew it wasn’t enough to ring up and say, “Please play ‘The Power of Love’ because my girlfriend and I were dancing to it when I proposed”—oh, no. I wanted to know what her exact response was, what kind of party they were at, what sort of shoes she was wearing, what brand of perfume.
People confessed secrets, scandals, tragedies to me. They sometimes cried, or said how much better they felt for getting whatever it was off their chest. The press had in the past compared me to a disc-spinning Frasier Crane, or “Claire Rayner in a DJ booth.”
Damn, I was good at it. “God is in the details,” I always said, and, “It’s not just about the music.” It was so important to set the scene, get people to dredge their minds for even the tiniest little piece of extra information. It made the record even more precious to them, while giving them a few minutes of fame and a Londonwide audience.
At first I worried that people would find it all too self-indulgent, and get bored listening to strangers’ stories of woe, but I was wrong; the format was a runaway success. Listeners really did want to know why “Only You” by Yazoo reminded Sharon from Herne Hill of how she once hid behind a crumbling car-park wall, in school uniform. When they found out it was because she was two-timing her boyfriend with an amber-eyed sixth-former, and that the amber-eyed sixth-former was killed in a car crash six weeks later, there were tears all round the M25.
But my novel format was another reason Geoff Hadleigh wasn’t my biggest fan. Commercial stations had strict quotas of records to stick to, playlists A, B, and C. He thought I’d never be able to fit requests in around the morning rituals of news, travel bulletins, ad breaks. But I had. We’d struck a deal whereby I could get away with sixty percent playlisted tracks and forty percent requests, unheard of on a breakfast show. It hadn’t made me popular with the other DJs, but I didn’t care. I knew I was a good DJ.
It felt so different from being in Blue Idea, where, even though I’d written the songs, I’d never felt that it was truly my achievement, because it was a group effort. New World was a whole new and revelatory ball game, where I’d succeeded because people liked my personality. Plus I didn’t have to go on tour for months at a time. It had come to mean everything to me. And my hard work had paid off—I’d doubled the station’s breakfast-show listenership in less than a year.
“Hello, Helena, you look … um … well, you have been in the wars, haven’t you? ”
“I thuppothe you’re here to fire me, aren’t you, Geoff?” I said, as if my mouth were full of peanuts.
He sat down on a chair next to the bed, pulled a capacious handkerchief from his jeans pocket, and blew his nose with a squeaky sound like a balloon deflating. I wondered if I was supposed to think he was crying.
“Of course not, Helena. We at New World would hate to lose you!”
“But?”
“But—you’re going to be recovering from this … accident for quite some time, aren’t you? You must realize that we can’t just get a temp to cover for you. Our listeners need continuity in their DJ, especially in the morning-drive time. By the time you’re well enough to come back—if ever—they will have gotten used to—”
I cut him off. “What do you mean, if ever? ”
“Well, um, I understand that your hearing is damaged, as well as you being, erm, physically impaired. If that didn’t return to normal, then … to put it bluntly … there’s no such thing as a deaf DJ. I’m afraid you couldn’t possibly drive your own desk anymore.”
For someone so nervous, he went straight for the jugular. Bastard. It was hard to disguise the loss of my eye, but I hadn’t wanted anyone to know about my deafness. Obviously there was no such thing as patient confidentiality, no matter how high the hospital bills were.
“Whoth doing my thow at the moment?” I asked jealously.
Geoff picked up and replaced several of my Get Well Soon cards, without looking at the messages. “Ralph Porter,” he said, almost defensively.
I exhaled with disgust. Ralph Porter couldn’t DJ his way out of a wet paper bag. I was about to inform Geoff of this, but he plowed on.
“So I’ve come here with a proposal for you, Helena. You take as much time as you need to get better, and then when you are, there’ll still be a job waiting for you at New World. I can’t let you go back to the breakfast show, but I’ll give you a regular night slot.”
Oh no, not the graveyard shift after all my hard work. No.
“But if my hearing returnth to normal, then thurely …?”
I tried hard not to plead, but failed. How could I do a request show at two A.M.? The big audience was what made it work so well—telling your stories to the whole of London. I even had bumper stickers saying HELENA LET ME TELL LONDON MY SONG. Who would care in the middle of the night, when the only listeners were night watchmen and drug-addled losers? It just wouldn’t work.
But Geoff was getting into his stride, possibly becoming used to the dreadful sight of my scarred and bruised face.
“I’m sorry, Helena, but it’s not as simple as your health. You wouldn’t believe the amount of flak I’ve had from the press and the watchdogs, about allegations that you and Justin were on cocaine at the UKMAs. Frankly, you’re lucky I’m not firing you.”
“You can’t prove anything,” I muttered sulkily.
“Let’s hope not, for all our sakes. Personally I don’t need proof—I was at the same table as you that night, remember, I saw what you were like.”
He got up, still holding the flowers. They dripped a spiteful puddle of water onto the floor.
“I’m sorry, Helena. I know how hard you’ve worked. I’ll give these to the nurse to put in a vase on my way out, shall I? Let me know if you want to take the job, whenever you’re ready.”
A BEACH AT LOW TIDE
TODAY I LOOKED IN A MIRROR FOR THE FIRST TIME. INTENTIONALLY, I mean, not just the accidental glance in the reflection of the window at night, or like when the towel covering the mirror in the bathroom slipped as I was washing my hands (I made Nurse Grace rig it up there as soon as I was well enough to get myself in and out of the en suite). I’d turned away instantly without letting myself get a proper look, but even that split second was enough to inform me that, yes, I was in fact a dead ringer for the Elephant Man.
But that morning Grace had said, “Ooh, Helena, you look so much better. The swelling’s really gone down. Once the stitches are out, you’ll almost be back to normal.”
I had more movement in my jaw every day, and the dressings on my face had been reduced to one big one where my eye used to be. Physically, I was on the mend.
The better I got, the more my vanity began to return. I made the nurses wash my hair (even though it hurt like mad to lean my head back) instead of tying a scarf over it, because it had gotten greasy enough to fry eggs on. Plus I became aware that my breath smelled foul. I hadn’t been able to clean my remaining teeth—ugh—since the accident. Mouthwash alone didn’t quite seem to hit the spot. I didn’t think anyone except me would care (Mum—well, she used to wipe my ass, so I was sure a spot of halitosis didn’t bother her
; the nurses—ditto), but that wasn’t the point. Thankfully a dentist was booked to come in and cap my stumpy teeth at the end of the week, which meant I’d be able to talk normally again, too.
This sudden resurgence of interest in my appearance made everyone very pleased with me, including the psychotherapist whom Mum summoned to my bedside twice a week to tell me that a spot of depression was Normal and To Be Expected. They all thought that it meant my gloom was subsiding and I was returning to my old self. But I was depressed before the accident! I felt like shouting.
Once or twice, though, I did allow a minnow of optimism to flash in my chest. Perhaps it would be okay, perhaps I could be normal again. But the minnow always swam off again instantly. I’d always be half-blind and scarred, my deafness still hadn’t healed, and Sam would always be dead. Sorry, folks, I thought. It’s only vanity.
I’d been afraid to look at myself before, but now I felt that I had to know how bad it really was. On some people scars could look quite distinguished. Suitably psyched up, I shuffled into the bathroom and closed the door. Pulling the cord to switch on the light, I held my breath and moved toward the towel veiling the mirror. I remembered my old face with affection and regret, like a lost love. How my only previous gripes about it had been the beginnings of those lines that Homer Simpson has, the ones that run down from nostril to mouth on each side, and faint wrinkles on my forehead even when I wasn’t frowning, like a beach at low tide.
Feeling like Dorian Gray, I closed my eyes and twitched the towel down.
Oh. My. God. If that was an improvement, I must have been unrecognizable before. Tears flowed down my bumpy, discolored face as I stared at it; it was bristling with stitches and striped with skin grafts. My formerly wonderful nose looked like the model for a Cubist painting. One of my eyebrows had all but disappeared, and I didn’t even dare examine the ridiculous teeth—the ulcers peppering my tongue told me how jagged they were.
The whole effect was as if someone had taken all the bits of my face off and then reassembled them without following the instructions properly. And my forehead was more wrinkly than ever. Basically, I was pig-ugly.
I did not stop crying until just before my doctor’s visit two hours later. When he came in to check my progress, I made a last-ditch attempt at optimism.
“So, once all this heals up, I will look kind of how I looked before, won’t I?”
The doctor gave me one of those rueful upside-down smiles and took my wrist between his fingers to monitor my pulse.
“Well, yes, of course,” he said doubtfully. “Kind of.”
THE PLAN
I‘D BEEN LYING IN BED, LISTENING ONE-EARED TO RALPH PORTER’S BREAKFAST show through my Walkman headphones, but after only five minutes I couldn’t stand it anymore. The show was testosterone-soaked rubbish, and hearing it in mono was making my head ache. I clicked off the radio and instead stared one-eyed at the dust motes sailing around in the morning sunlight, wondering how old flecks of carpet, dandruff, and naval fluff managed to look so sparkly and beautiful. I wished I could shrink down to that size—pure, uncomplicated, free. I couldn’t think of anything better.
Then the dust motes reminded me of my favorite movie soundtrack, The Big Blue, which was my “touring album” in 1988, at the height of Blue Idea’s success. It was such a wonderfully mellow record; I’d played it through headphones on tour buses and private jets across the world whenever I wanted to transform from a world-weary lump of exhaustion to a tiny light atom, floating blissfully about in space.
I imagined myself phoning up my own breakfast show and requesting “Deep Blue Dream” from The Big Blue. Would I play it for me? Yes, I thought, if I described to London exactly how I’d felt back then, reclining in all those luxuriantly upholstered velour seats, being waited on hand and foot, in the days when I was unscarred and in demand. I should have been reveling in the attention, but Sam had been lying ill in hospital at that time, hovering wraithlike between dreaming and death, and there’d been nothing I could do except worry.
In the remembering, I tasted the bubbles of American Airlines’s mimosas on my tongue, felt the slippery texture of the linen napkins at the Four Seasons in Tokyo, saw the sun rise and set through so many airplane windows. I heard the screams of fans in fifty different countries, how they made my name sound new in each different language. And I remembered how nothing had mattered to me except Sam’s recovery. Behind it all, the tape of “Deep Blue Dream” spooled softly, nostalgically, in my head.
The pain of my losses stabbed me suddenly. My eye, my Sam, my job, my looks—all gone. It surprised me how much it hurt to lose my job. Only Sam’s death hurt more. I didn’t want to do a two A.M. show. I didn’t want to do a show that wasn’t about people’s memories, their music.
But I couldn’t just slink away in disgrace. I don’t do disgrace, I thought. There had to be some other option. I thought about what I really wanted out of life, what exactly it was that I’d been working toward all these years.
Eventually, what I came up with was me, Helena Nicholls, being somebody. Not as a songwriter or band member or even as a DJ, not as a friend or girlfriend or daughter, however important all those things were, but as me. I wanted people to remember my name with admiration, not scorn. Not “Oh, her, she was that DJ who got high and smashed her face up—and didn’t she use to be in some eighties band? ”
And right now I was in serious danger of meeting that “didn’t she use to be” fate. Helena Nicholls, made a prat of herself and was never seen again.
So the situation required drastic measures.
A plan started to form in my mind, gathering its genesis around itself like a snail shell’s twirl, tighter and tighter, until all my ducks lined up, quack, quack, quack, in an orderly fashion, and I thought, Yes, now I know exactly what I’m going to do.
I’ll tell Geoff Hadleigh I’ll accept his offer of a job, I decided, and I’ll tell him that my hearing has recovered, whether it has or not. Starting from now, I’ll make a list of all the records that have played behind my life, my requests, and write down, in detail, exactly why I’ve picked them. A life’s soundtrack will take more than just a five-minute explanation—if I talked about it on air, I’d never have time to play the songs themselves. Hence the accompanying manuscript.
When I come to broadcast all the songs, even though it will be two A.M. and the show’s ratings will be minuscule, it will make radio history. Once everybody realizes what I’ve done, what I’m going to lock myself in the bathroom and do immediately after the show. I don’t know what method I’ll use yet; pills, probably. But it’s not important how I do it.
The point is that it will make me a legend. Bigger than I ever was in Blue Idea, or as a hip breakfast DJ, and certainly bigger than the silly tart who broke her face on a dance floor. Justin’s career will skyrocket. All our old records will be rereleased. It’ll make all the papers. Hopefully I’ll get a publishing deal for the book, and the New World show could be released on a compilation CD. Perhaps even a Hollywood movie …
I got out a pen and a pad of lined A4 (which Mum had brought me, hoping in vain that I might cheer up enough to write some song lyrics) and prepared to take the plunge. I can do this, I told myself. I can write. I’d won awards for my songs; I’d written hundreds of letters to Sam; kept a diary for a little while. In fact, I’d already been published, if you counted the abysmally puerile Bluezine (a fanzine the record company made me churn out from the road).
Hell, I’d been meaning to write my autobiography for years. This would just be a different way of doing it. Using the songs would help me focus—I didn’t want to do one of those all-encompassing tomes that subscribed to the “more is more” philosophy, and besides, I’d never be able to remember it all without thinking of the records that went along with it.
It felt so weird, not having to think in rhymes and verses, no breaks for middle eights or guitar solos. This was my life; it needed to be fluent, complete, yet selective. No choruses or i
ntros. No neat bite-sized chunks.
I was going to begin at the beginning, me and Sam, but then I thought—no. Start with the accident, then you’ll get it out of the way and not have to think about it again. It had its own record, very definitely: Space with Cerys of Catatonia—“The Ballad of Tom Jones.” It was a pity, really. I always loved that song, the humor and harmonies and sexy Cerys to boot. Now I loathed it. For days after I regained consciousness it kept going through and through my battered head. It was such a bizarrely chirpy song to induce such terrible memories.
Space with Cerys of Catatonia
THE BALLAD OF TOM JONES
IT HAPPENED ON THE NIGHT OF THE U.K. MUSIC AWARDS, THE biggest of the annual music business backslapping events. I’d been to the UKMAs six times altogether, and Sam had come with me as my guest three times.
This time it was all different. I wasn’t at the Ringside Records table anymore, no longer in one of the planet’s bestselling bands, nor with a solo career like Justin. Worst of all, Sam wasn’t sitting beside me starry-eyed, because she was dead.
I suppose I should have been thankful that at least I still had a career. I was with a new set of colleagues, my fellow DJs and other assorted top brass from New World FM. The DJs mostly cold-shouldered me, but I was used to it—they were just jealous.
I was determined to have a good time regardless, thinking that a night out might cheer me up a bit, take my mind off Sam. But of course that was stupid. I wanted her there so badly that I felt sick.
To my joy and relief to see a friendly face, I bumped into Justin later. It was the first time I’d seen him in over two years. He had a mad glitter in his eyes, and his shirt was rumpled, torn out of his trousers by the teenagers who’d waited hours for him outside, on an unseasonably chilly spring night. When I’d arrived they were there, all pressed up against the barriers lining the red carpet, not even noticing the cold night air, which sent their star-studded breath cloudy. Not that they’d paid much attention to me, though.
