by Louise Voss
Justin looked gorgeous, of course. It was funny how I’d never seriously fancied him, apart from a two-minute crush when we first met. I was possibly the only straight woman on earth who didn’t. I think it must have had something to do with rank socks, transit vans, audible bodily functions, and other such traumatic memories from the band’s early days.
He told me I looked beautiful, too, and I really knew it. It took a tiny edge off the fist of grief in my chest, to see myself as everyone else was seeing me. I was wearing my backless velvet dress, soft folds of burnt orange caressing my breasts, tight across my belly and hips, and swirling erotically around my legs. The chill of air-conditioned air, which occasionally skittered up and down my bare spine, turned me on like a lover’s fingers.
I remembered how Sam had once said that, that even the air-conditioning was making her feel sexy. Sam adored the UKMAs, for the sense of spectacle of the whole event. She used to bang on about it being “an awesome collision of the huge and the tiny,” pointing everything out to me as if I couldn’t see it myself: The enormous venue; the tiny sparkling lights winking and blinking across the ceiling like stars. The massive banks of speakers; small performers onstage blown up huge by video screens. Little reedy voices making industry small talk around big tables. Glitter everywhere, on the women’s cleavages and cheekbones, in the men’s eyes as they sized up the talent. Sam didn’t miss a thing. And when Blue Idea won Best International Group (we were an American band—I was the only Brit) two years in a row, she was embarrassingly pleased for me. Even when we didn’t win, she wouldn’t shut up about how proud she was of me. “It’s because I can see the respect in everyone’s eyes when they look at you,” she’d said. “And these aren’t your fans, they’re your peers. That makes it even better.”
Justin knew Sam, I thought, a long time ago. I’d better tell him.
“Justin,” I said. “I’ve got some bad news, I’m afraid.”
Justin looked anxiously down at himself to make sure his fly wasn’t undone, and then wiped under his nose in case the news was that something horrible had crawled out of his nostril to alight on his upper lip.
“No, not about you,” I said crossly. Honestly, he was so vain.
“My friend Sam died, a couple of months ago.”
Justin arranged his face in an expression of vague condolence, without a flicker of recognition.
“Sam, you know, my English friend who used to visit me all the time. You shagged her. Gorgeous, tall, gray eyes, long legs.”
My voice quivered with the pain of describing someone I’d never see again.
Light still didn’t dawn in Justin’s eyes, but he made a good pretense of remembering.
“Ohhhh, right! Now I know who you mean. Oh, Jesus, H, that’s terrible. You poor baby! Such a cute girl, too. What a bummer. Come here.”
He tried to envelop me in a bear hug, but I pushed him away. I didn’t want to start crying among all the sparkly people.
“Okay then, Ms. Nicholls, only one thing for it—and it’s in a small packet in my top pocket. Come on, a flat surface and a credit card await us.”
I tutted irritably.
“You know I don’t like cocaine,” I said.
“Wrong,” replied Justin, frog-marching me toward the backstage loos. “I know that you actually love cocaine, and that’s why you never do it. You’re afraid of getting hooked. Well, I think that’s totally sensible and mature of you—but give yourself a break, just this once. It’ll make you feel much better.”
He was partly right about the fear bit, but it wasn’t the only reason I abstained. I’d spent years enduring the company of bug-eyed, bollock-talking, coked-up prats the world over, and I had no desire whatsoever to join their chopped-out ranks. Plus Sam hadn’t approved.
But Sam wasn’t there.
We ended up in a cubicle in the ladies’, Justin sculpting two huge chrysalises on the toilet lid with his credit card. I wondered how many lines he’d previously ingested, since he’d suddenly become totally paranoid, grumbling sotto voce throughout the entire operation.
“What if someone sees us?” he asked.
“So what? Everyone else is doing the same thing. Listen.”
I angled my ear toward the thin partition of the cubicle next to ours, and pointed down toward the heel of a man’s boot, which could be seen underneath the wall. The sound of sniffs and gruff mutters was clearly audible.
“Not everyone. I have to be so careful, Helena. People might not recognize you anymore, but I could end up with my face splashed all over the papers. It could ruin my career!”
“What do you mean? You’re the one with the eighth in your breast pocket, so it can’t bother you too much. And besides, you aren’t the only one with a career—I’ve still got a face to get splashed and a career to be ruined, too, you know.”
How prophetic. The papers weren’t all my face ended up splashed over. But all I was concerned with at that moment was the fat tapered line of cocaine camouflaged before me on the white porcelain altar. I knelt in worship, not even caring that my beautiful dress was trailing on the sticky tiled floor.
The UKMAs eventually wore down to a tired crawl. People were beginning to huddle around their tables in a jumble of black ties and diamanté, like affluent refugees waiting to be rehoused. The mini–fairground rides no longer had to be queued for, and there were puddles of vomit in discreet corners of the arena.
At two A.M. Justin and I decided it was time to move on, and so we managed to fight our way through the hordes of drunk and fractious A&R men milling around outside, to claim Justin’s pre-booked limo. We headed back into Soho to a club where his promotions company was holding a private party. We were both wired, and we knew that this was the Place to Be Seen. I wanted so badly to be seen. I was suddenly fed up with the more low-key fame of being a DJ, hungry for the old thrill of adoration I needed to justify my existence.
The air in the club was muggy with cigarette smoke and overly subtle lighting, claustrophobic after the vast hangar of the Docklands Arena. It was a tableau of studied and strained chic, everyone dressed up to the nines, but well the worse for wear, trying to hold it all together.
Jus had a crowd of acolytes constantly hanging around him, and I felt put out. Although he’d always been the focal point of the band, as the token female and songwriter I’d usually received more than my fair share of adulation, too. But it had been a while.
It was a boring party, dull music, drunk people. I was considering going home, but then it all changed. After a lot of worthier-than-thou trip hop, “The Ballad of Tom Jones” suddenly came blasting over the PA, perking me up more successfully than the previous three lines of coke had.
“Let’s dance,” I said, dragging Jus away from his sycophants toward a raised area of the dance floor, empty except for the swirling lights swooping and glancing over its blackness, giving it the appearance of a deep murky pool.
“To this? You never dance! And besides, no one can dance to this!” he protested, trying to shake off my hand as we climbed up the three steps at the side of the stage.
“I never threw my knickers at you, Tom Jones, Tom Jones,” Cerys warbled innocently.
Justin was right. It must have been the coke talking, since I had never been much of a dancer, other than a bit of jigging around onstage with my bass, and the song was about as impossible to dance to as “Come on Eileen.” My one big chance to show off: a whole four hundred square feet of media possibilities, all to ourselves, like the old days of the band, no competition—but in this case no inspiration either. There was no way I was going to shuffle around halfheartedly and then skulk sheepishly off again in defeat.
A memory came back to me of an old playground game Sam and I used to play, the junior school’s equivalent of drugs, I supposed. A head rush of shifting gravity and stretched boundaries, the scary exhilaration of having no choice but to trust your partner implicitly, blood pounding in your ears and rushing scarlet around behind your eyeballs.
“I know,” I said, like the ten-year-old me. “Turn around, put your back against mine. Now link arms with me from behind.”
Jus obliged, puzzled. We were still alone on the stage and already people were shooting glances at us from the bar area, wondering why we were standing back-to-back. I noticed, and the buzz in my head intensified. I began to bend forward, trying to pull him up onto my back. He twigged what I was proposing and twisted away from me.
“Stop it, Helena! You’re crazy—you can’t seesaw me in the middle of a stage! Besides, I’m way heavier than you!”
I was mortified. To stop now would make me look ridiculous—just when I was beginning to attract some attention, too.
“It’s cool.” I grabbed his arms behind his back and relocked them in mine. “Please, let’s have a go. It’ll be a laugh. What happened to the old daredevil Justin that we all knew and loved? You’d have done this five years ago—people will think you’ve lost your nerve!”
I knew all the right buttons to push, and it worked a treat.
“Go ahead, then, Wonder Woman,” he said. “Jeez, talk about putting me in some embarrassing situations. I’ll never live this down.”
I could feel the warmth of his sticky skin through his thin silk shirt, and the way his shoulder blades nudged me just below my own. It felt nice, safe and familiar on my bare back. We were actually around the same height, but that night in my three-inch wedge heels I was taller. The hairs on his forearms tickled mine as we wriggled around a bit to get comfortable.
“Ready?” I asked, over one shoulder. “I’ll go first!”
So right there, in front of a half-amused, half-aghast crowd of minor media personalities, we began seesawing each other up and down, my legs flying in the air as I balanced on his back, then my own creaking spine taking the weight of the somewhat heavier Justin. He held back at first, worried that I wouldn’t be able to support him, but soon we got into a groove. Up and down, blood rushing to my head as I leaned forward to swing him up, and then my own cocaine-enhanced flight into the disco night, serenaded by Cerys. Then he began to relax and enjoy it, too, and we were laughing, harder and harder. I saw a blur of grinning faces below me and I thought they were laughing with us.
But then the laughter and the exertion and the drugs suddenly all took their toll on my body, and my knees gave a tiny little tremble as I hoisted Jus horizontal for the last time. The tremble ran down my right leg and into my ankle, which twisted slightly. It was enough to make me lose my balance, and I began to lurch heavily to the right, toward the edge of the stage. But at the same time, Jus was in full flight. The second before I stumbled, he gave a joyful whoop and kicked his legs as high as he could, his full weight pressed along my back.
I fell. But I didn’t just fall, the way you do when you trip on an uneven paving slab or down a step. My arms, you recall, were tightly pinioned to my sides, and worse, at that particular moment, pulled even further away from the ground by Justin’s joyous ascent.
I slipped off the stage and fell three feet, literally, flat on my face. Look, no hands, nose impacting first. All one hundred fifty pounds of Jus landed on top of me, mashing my head still further into the dance floor.
But it got worse. In the six or so inches of sprung wooden floor with which my head collided, some other careless reveler had recently dropped his champagne glass. It had broken, of course, and yes, it was still lying there in wait for my tender face.
Over the ringing in my ears, I was aware of a distant crunching sound. Immediately before passing out, I noticed several jagged pieces of ivory swimming sedately past me in a bubbling puddle of blood. Good-bye, expensive teenage dental correction work.
The last thing I remember was little Tommy Space confirming, “I don’t come from Wales …,” and thinking, Sam, oh Sam, please help me.
INTRUSION
“DADDY! DADD-DEEE! MUMMY!”
I’d been lost in writing about my first meeting with Sam, and the cry nearly made me jump out of my patchwork skin. All my misaligned facial bones rubbed painfully together, and I stopped scribbling, irritated. The voice came from my left, near the door. I couldn’t see anybody, although if I turned my head as far as possible, I could tell that the door was ajar.
A storm of histrionic childish sobbing ensued. By rolling onto my left side, I could see a bundle of purple and pink fun-fur crumpled pitifully on the floor by my bed.
“Er—hello?” I said, trying to make my voice as laden with sarcasm as possible, despite being aware that this probably wasn’t the most effective method of dealing with a stray distraught toddler.
The crying intensified, and my head started to throb. Honestly, couldn’t I even plan my suicide in peace? So much for my privacy and protection—if theatrical two-year-olds could wander in and out at will, then what was to stop a Sun photographer, or a deranged stalker? I began to feel very put out.
Gingerly, I slid out of bed and got to my knees on the floor, where I stretched out my hand and poked the little girl’s furry shoulder.
“Where’th your mummy?”
She looked up at me then, and the sight of my stitched and bruised face caused her to leap to her feet in one move, like a vertical takeoff. Recoiling with horror, she ran and hid behind my visitor’s armchair. At least she was shocked into silence, though.
“I like your coat,” I mumbled encouragingly. It was true, I did. I contemplated asking her where she’d gotten it from, on the off-chance they did it in grown-up sizes.
“Pink flowerth,” came a hesitant reply. I saw a small finger stroke one of the said pink flowers.
“Very nith,” I said. “Will you come and talk to me now?”
“NO! You got panda bear face like my mummy! I want my mummy!”
I tried hard not to be hurt or angry, deciding that a frosty “Do you know who I am?” might not do the trick here.
“Where ith your mummy?” I asked again.
“No more nap, Mummy! Wake up now!” The finger wagged accusingly, and the tone became quite stern.
“Would you like a thweetie?” I ventured.
Pathetically, I was by now quite enjoying the distraction from my project. It was much harder work than I’d imagined, writing with only one eye to mediate between brain and paper. In slow motion I reached for the tin of travel sweets my mother had forgotten on her last visit. (Very insensitive of her, too, I thought. My jaw was still very tender, and I was enduring meals whose consistency my current visitor had probably outgrown at five months of age.)
Mutely, the hand stretched out.
“Well, come on, then, I won’t bite … although the chanth would be a fine thing.”
She sidled out, eyes downcast. Apart from the chubby red face clashing with her pink and purple coat, she was pretty cute. Skinny little curls sprouted vertically from her head, and her teary eyes held worldly-wise blue depths.
I handed her a wrapped sweet.
“Tankoo,” she said politely.
“You’re welcome.”
She had just crinkled off the paper and popped it into her mouth when my least-favorite nurse, Catriona, knocked and stuck her head round the door.
“Oh, thank heavens, there she is!” she said crossly. “Ruby, your daddy’s been looking everywhere for you!”
Catriona retreated and returned almost immediately with a blond curly-haired man, gray around the eyes with exhaustion and what looked like abject misery. They marched into the room, ignoring me completely.
“What am I, chopped liver?” I said to no one in particular. I was still kneeling on the floor in my nightie, suddenly vulnerable.
“Ruby Middleton, what have I told you about wandering off?” said the man, halfheartedly.
“Daddy! My daddy!” came the ecstatic reply as Ruby hurled herself at her father’s kneecaps. Suddenly we all heard a very strange noise emanating from the depths of the fur coat, a kind of gurgling, hawking sound. Alarmed, the man prised her away from his knees and peered into her puce face.
“Oh my God, she’s choking!” he yelled. “Nurse!”
Catriona, who had just left the room, hurried back in and grabbed Ruby. Inverting her briskly, she slapped her lengthily and enthusiastically between the shoulder blades.
A small green boiled sweet dislodged itself from Ruby’s windpipe and flew across the room, bouncing against the far wall and finally coming to rest under my bed. Ruby, howling, was turned back up the right way, and clung to her father. We all looked silently in the direction of the offending travel sweet, until Catriona spoke.
“Well, for heaven’s sake! Who on earth was daft enough to give a boiled sweet to a toddler?! Some people have absolutely no sense. I mean, really!”
At that moment she and Ruby’s dad simultaneously spotted the tin of sweets on my nightstand.
“Thorry,” I muttered, climbing back into bed, furious with myself for feeling so guilty.
Catriona sniffed and left the room, and I was alone with the man and Ruby. I waited for him to give me a piece of his mind, and was preparing to tell him to sling his hook and leave me in peace, when he suddenly grinned at me. I was totally disarmed.
“I really am thorry,” I said again, more genuinely this time. I felt confused—what was the correct etiquette for receiving unintentionally visiting strangers in hospital?
The man looked as though the same thought had just passed through his own head.
“No, I’m sorry,” he said, “on behalf of Trouble here. It’s terrible of us to barge in when you’re trying to recover in peace and quiet. We’ll get out of your hair now.”
All of a sudden I didn’t want them to leave. Apart from Mum arriving from the U.S., hideous Geoff Hadleigh, and a quick embarrassed fly-past from my production team at New World, I hadn’t had any visitors. Justin had sent flowers but hadn’t shown his (unblemished) face, which really upset me, and the other band members were all in the States, too. I was devastated to realize how few friends I really had now that Sam was gone.
