by Louise Voss
At first I’d kept this fact from Sam, in case it upset her, but she was remarkably nonchalant about their whole dalliance. “He’s cute, it passed the time. We were never planning to keep in touch or anything,” she said. I was surprised at her attitude—I’d always assumed that she’d take these things much more seriously. It was a part of her life I didn’t really know that much about.
I got up and got dressed, sandpaper on the inside of my eyelids, feeling like I’d woken with a squid on my face. Stepping over the prone sleeping figures of Joe and David in the living room on my way to the kitchen, I glanced at the incongruous Superman clock on Aunt Sandi’s kitchen wall and noticed with horror that it was already 12:45.
Simon, Ringside’s radio promotions guy, had impressed upon us that we needed to be at the office by three P.M. for a couple of radio phoner interviews in the Ringside conference room. Our third album, Spin Shiny, had just come out, and the promotions machine was at full throttle.
I made coffee and took it in to the others to herald the start of their long, drawn-out waking process, which was accompanied as usual by much moaning and groaning. Eventually we were all up, showered, and in a chauffeur-driven car that would drop us at the office only a little past three. I was desperately hoping Justin had not forgotten the commitment, and to my surprise and relief he was already there when we arrived, lounging on Ringside’s visitors’ sofa looking peaky.
He grinned weakly but proudly at me and shoved his hand in my face as if he expected me to kiss it. “Look, see, bet you thought I’d forget!”
He had R’SIDE 3 PM in faint but thick, wavering blue letters on the back of his hand.
“Very good, Jus, well done, we’re all impressed,” I told him, not entirely sarcastically.
Tom and Simon ushered us into the conference room, plying us with more coffee and welcome bagels, as we had had neither the time nor the stomach for a proper breakfast, let alone lunch. They conferenced Joe and Justin in with the first radio station, and myself and David with the second. After a few minutes we switched round and talked to the other station.
When we were finished, Tom had us sign some posters and CDs to give away as prizes in competitions, or as incentives for record store clerks. We were working away at the conference-room table when I had a sudden thought.
“Oh, my God—what’s the date today?”
Being on tour for so long seemed to have confounded our time clocks. None of us had a clue what city we were in half the time, let alone what day it was.
“It’s August twenty-eighth,” said David. “Why?”
“Shit, it’s not, is it?” I wailed as the door opened and Willy came in with a fresh supply of posters.
“Hi, guys. Tom’s on the phone, so he asked me to bring you these. What’s the matter, Helena?” he asked, looking at my stricken face.
“Oh, nothing … It’s just that I’ve missed someone’s birthday, that’s all.”
It was Cynthia Grant’s birthday, and I always sent her a card. I had thought about it the week before but had promptly forgotten again.
Willy put down the posters, and they fanned out in a graceful arc across the shiny surface of the meeting-room table. “Do you want to call them?”
“Really? But it’s long distance.” I felt faintly cheeky at the thought of running up Ringside’s phone bill, until I remembered that they were about to move to new, much more palatial offices, the upgrade funded in no small part by the sales of our records. They could stand me the price of a phone call to England, and hopefully I’d be able to chat to Sam, too.
“It’s no problem, honestly. You can use the phone in my office if you like.”
He lowered his voice conspiratorially. “I’m always on the phone to my mates in London—but don’t tell Rob.”
“Well, thanks. I’d love to.”
I stood up, calculating that it would be only nine-thirty in Salisbury, and the Grants should be around on a weeknight. Cynthia might be working, but would more likely be having a few birthday rum and Cokes in the saloon bar with her girlfriends, and Sam would probably be there, too. I knew that she was working in a Salisbury solicitor’s office during her summer break. Either way, I didn’t think it would be a problem. There was a phone at the bottom of the stairs where they kept the boxes of crisps, and I knew that it could easily be heard from the bar.
Willy led me over to what he had laughingly called his “office” but which was in reality a desk in an odd corner cranny of the open-plan but terribly cramped label workspace. I had to climb over several boxes of Blue Idea T-shirts and a huge and perilously unstable pile of records to get to his chair. A Big Star album was blaring from speakers in the center of the room, and I wondered how I’d ever be able to hear anything. There was a stack of black-and-white eight-by-tens of us on Willy’s desk, and I turned the top one facedown so I wouldn’t have to look at my monochrome face looming up at me while I talked.
With the receiver clamped hard against my ear to try to block out the noise, I dialed the Grants’ number. It rang for ages.
Eventually an unfamiliar woman’s voice answered, and I put my finger into my free ear. “Prince of Wales, hello?” she said faintly.
“Hello, can I speak to Cynthia Grant please?” I asked.
There was a pause. “I’m sorry, she’s—not around at the moment.”
“Well, could I speak to Sam instead, then?”
A longer pause. I heard the sound of a hand being put over the receiver and a muffled question in the background. Then a kind of scuffling noise. The woman, whom I assumed must be a new barmaid, came back on the line.
“Who is it?”
“It’s Helena,” I said, starting to feel worried. Something did not seem right.
“Hold on a minute please.”
The receiver clunked down, and I visualized it resting on top of a box of Worcester sauce crisps. The Big Star record, thankfully, came to a sudden scratching halt. Then Mrs. Grant came on the line.
“Helena, love, how are you?” She sounded terribly tired, not the festive person I’d expected at all.
“Happy birthday to you!” I chirped enthusiastically, as usual avoiding having to call her Cynthia. “How’s things? Are you having a nice day? I’m really sorry I forgot to send you a card, but our new album is—”
She cut off my apology abruptly, a terrible catch in her voice. “Oh, Helena, I …”
“What is it, what’s the matter? Are you ill? Has something happened to the pub?”
I felt fear begin to swoop down over my head like the corners of a black veil.
“No, worse—Helena, I’m really sorry—it’s our Sammy.”
The veil enveloped me completely and I thought I was going to faint. Mrs. Grant sounded completely devastated. She’s dead, I thought. Oh God, Sam is dead. Then she spoke again, as if from the bottom of a well. “She’s in hospital.”
A sensation like gravity’s pull assailed me, a strange mixture of relief and terror. Relief that she wasn’t dead, terror because this obviously was not an inflamed appendix or troublesome tonsils.
“What’s happened—has she been in an accident?” I managed to stammer. I could hear Mrs. Grant struggling for breath, or for strength, at the other end of the phone.
“Helena, I don’t know how to tell you this.… She wasn’t feeling well, so she had some tests.… They’ve found out that she’s got leukemia. Acute myeloid leukemia, it’s called. She’s already started the treatment.”
The wall in front of me rocked violently, and I had to grip on to the edge of Willy’s desk. My mind went completely blank for a second, and then out of a gray cloud emerged some tiny animated images, like frames of an old home movie: Sam and me as children cycling home from school on our little kiddie bikes, hers turquoise, mine pale pink.
“Helena, are you all right?” I heard in the distance. “Don’t worry, love. The doctors say she should be okay. There’s lots of things they can do for it these days. We only found out yesterday, and she
’s started the chemotherapy right away.… ” Mrs. Grant’s voice broke, but she rallied herself. “And it should be fine, she should be fine. Really. Try not to worry. Say something—are you still there?”
Sam had had a little white plastic basket tied to the handlebars of her bike. It had pale blue ribbons that streamed out behind the fake wicker when she pedaled, and I had coveted it without shame. In the silence I could faintly hear the pub’s jukebox playing Robert Wyatt’s “Shipbuilding,” and a man’s deep, distant laugh. I swallowed hard.
“I’m here. But how is she? Is she in pain? Has she been ill for a long time?”
“Mike and I have just come back from the hospital now. She’s feeling dreadfully sick, but otherwise she’s not in actual pain. They’ve got her heavily sedated. We have to wait and see how she responds to the treatment.”
I think we may have talked for a little longer, but my mind had whirled off into a realm of grief somewhere else, and I couldn’t remember any more of the conversation. For some reason, I couldn’t get the image of that little white basket and the doleful lyrics of “Shipbuilding” out of my head. With every atom in my body I wished fiercely that I could be where Sam was, and not in that stupid, filthy office full of strangers. I sat at Willy’s desk for a long time, gazing dry-eyed at the wall, not having any idea what to do next.
A hand touched my shoulder. It was David. “We’re done, Helena. Are you ready to go?”
As I stood up, my stomach suddenly heaved and seemed to flip over. Aware of David, Justin, Joe, Willy, and half the Ringside label staff staring at me with incredulity and concern, I careered out of the room, just about managing to grab a nearby office rubbish bin on the way, and was copiously sick.
David came and rescued me from the women’s bathroom. Throwing up had also induced a flood of tears, so he tidied me up, clucking and crooning over me, listening to my sobbed-out story while wiping my face with a scratchy paper towel and stroking my hair clumsily. I allowed myself to be led out of the office and into a waiting limo, and taken back to Aunt Sandi’s apartment. I didn’t want to go back to the impersonal, empty hotel room.
When Sandi got home from work, she and the boys talked in hushed voices in the next room, then she came in and gave me a sleeping pill and a cup of hot chocolate. Fortunately there was no show that night, and I fell into a deep, exhausted sleep of grief and disbelieving.
NOT SUCH A COINCIDENCE
HOW DID PEOPLE WHO LOST LIFELONG SPOUSES HANDLE THE PAIN? Sam had “only” been a friend, not a lover or partner, but I couldn’t cope with knowing that I’d never see her again. As I sat at the kitchen table staring glumly into the middle distance, something inside my stomach snarled at me, loudly enough to be heard above the moaning of my depression and the dolorous bass of “Shipbuilding.” After a moment’s consideration I realized, with some surprise, that it was hunger.
Suddenly I knew that I had to get out of the house and get some food. I was absolutely, overwhelmingly ravenous. If I stayed indoors for even one minute longer, I would start gnawing the kitchen counters.
Mum had stocked up for me before she went home, but now the freezer was empty except for half a packet of broad beans. I was down to chocolate spread and capers in the cupboard, and my fruit bowl contained four shriveled grapes and a fossilized lime. I’d been living on noodle soup for the past four days, and I was craving fresh juice, hot bread, colorful salads.
I usually got Sainsburys to home-deliver my groceries, but such was my frame of mind that I hadn’t been able to face the hassle of trying to order over the telephone, let alone exchange small talk with a delivery man. My snap decision to get in the car and go there myself was probably borne from a combination of physical need and mental exhaustion—I needed food, quickly, and I needed to do something to take my mind off my terrible sense of loss.
My daring plan to venture into the outside world filled me with a sudden sense of wild recklessness. Donning shades and a floppy sun hat, I picked up the car keys and left the house, glancing constantly around me as I locked up and got in the car. Still no sign of the stalker, thank God.
I drove to Sainsburys with the roof open and a fresh summer wind flapping the brim of my sun hat, congratulating myself on my positive decision, and beginning to feel a tiny bit less miserable. It was fantastic to be back behind the wheel of my car after so long.
Everything was going much better than expected—until I reached the supermarket. I hadn’t realized it was Saturday. The car park was full to capacity, and row upon row of hot metal chassis glinted at me, taunting me with the knowledge that each car equaled one or more people banging up and down the aisles inside. If I went in, I’d be face-to-face with them all. There would be no security men or velvet ropes or limos to keep us apart, not even the soundproofed cocoon of a DJ’s studio and the coziness of headphones. Just me and the great, ordinary unwashed.
I drove right around the perimeter of the car park and straight out onto the road again, just about managing to avoid a huge wobbly line of pushed-together trolleys being coraled into a pen by two bored employees.
Change of plan. I could go home and phone Home Shopping, but then I’d have to wait for them to deliver, and I was too hungry. I took a detour past my favorite deli, but in the three months since I’d last been there, the windows had been whitewashed and the door locked. CLOSED DOWN DUE TO DEATH, read a shakily lettered sign in the window. I know how that feels, I thought, and carried on into Richmond.
There was a Tesco Metro in the town center—still a supermarket, but a smaller, less intimidating one. I’d be in and out much more quickly, I reasoned, hunger forcing me to try again. Eventually I found a parking space by the river and made my way back toward Tesco’s, realizing with rising panic that there were probably even more people jostling around on the sunny town center pavements than there had been in Sainsburys. My legs were already beginning to quiver with the unaccustomed effort of walking, and I was so tense that my jaw and nose were aching. I felt a pang of longing for my mother, wishing that she would materialize at my side and proffer a plump elbow for me to hang on to.
But I made it. As soon as I got through the door of Tesco’s, I grabbed a carton of cherry-flavored milk from the shelf and chugged it straight down. This gave me the energy to continue, and in five minutes flat I was queuing, blissfully unnoticed, at the checkout with a basket full of prepackaged salad, milk, bread, croissants, a bag full of individually wrapped cheeses, bananas, oranges, and the empty carton. I promised myself that I’d order all other nonessentials by phone when I got home.
The checkout girl barely even glanced at me as I paid. Too preoccupied with trying to hike her bra strap back onto her skinny shoulder, she shortchanged me, but I was too eager to escape unrecognized to point it out to her.
Flushed with success, I even dared to sidle into HMV on my way back to the car, where I purchased a copy of The Jam’s All Mod Cons on CD. I’d only ever owned it on vinyl, and I needed to start thinking about collecting CDs together for the show. This would be a start.
By now I was really beginning to feel unwell. My legs still felt wobbly, and the hunger and the cherry milk had collided in my stomach to form a queasy compromise. I needed a sit-down, and possibly a croissant. I took a right turn down toward the river, and my car, but instead of emerging in a quiet side street, I came out in a large riverside area next to Richmond Bridge. This, too, was crowded with people.
The Richmond riverfront in summer had a definite beach-resort, Club 18–30 feel to it: sweaty people queued at ice-cream van windows, clutching their plastic cups of European lager in one hand and their small change in the other. The bars were packed, there were boats for hire, and half-stripped bodies lay sprawled on the grassy terraced area above the river. An extremely high tide was just receding, water still lapping over the edge of the bank, a wash of dark cooling the hot pavement. A few lads were standing in this puddle, shoes off, trousers rolled up, glugging their pints and looking around self-consciously to
see who was watching them. A dog leaped into the river, scaring away a scattering of ducks and making a group of implausibly tanned girls scream as the splash sent drops of murky Thames water into their vodka and limes.
I was about to turn in the direction of my mislaid car when I felt another hot stab of panic. I was in the middle of this huge crowd of strangers, vulnerable, exhausted, and sick, and my only protection against recognition was shades and a sun hat. I raised a hand to my head to check that both were still in place.
Deep breath, I thought. These people are your listeners and—some of the older ones—your fans. Just sit down and have a rest. No one will bother you.
Finding a space on the patchy town-center grass, I brushed away a few fag ends and a rusty bottle top, and lowered myself gingerly. It felt nice, actually. The sun was warm on my thighs, and scratchy stems tickled the backs of my legs. I rolled up the tops of my shorts, scoffed a croissant, and tried to relax.
Not wanting to appear unoccupied, I delved into my bag for my new CD and began to wrestle with the shrink wrap. As usual, the sticky top-spine bearing band name and album title didn’t peel off in one go, but broke away in irritating little slivers, behaving in the way that Sellotape does when you’re tired. I jabbed at it with my thumbnail and eventually managed to unwrap it.
I opened the jewel case and extracted the booklet, reading snatches of lyrics while trying to recover my energy and courage. A couple near me in matching Stussy T-shirts and denim shorts suddenly nudged each other, jerked their eyebrows in my direction, and laughed.
I froze with horror, as color flamed across my cheeks. Ramming the CD back into my bag, I stood up, brushing grass off the seat of my shorts, and moved away through the throng to find somewhere else to sit.
“Check her out,” I heard another man say to his companion, and he pointed at me, sniggering.
