by Louise Voss
Somehow I found his assertiveness very attractive. He was so different from any other man I’d ever met, and I wondered if it could be because he wasn’t the slightest bit in awe of me. I showed him back down the hall into the sitting room and offered him a choice of sofas. But he leapt over to the stereo and pounced on the Massive Attack CD case I’d left out from earlier.
“Hey, I love this. It’s amazing. Is it in the machine? Great, let’s listen to this.”
He pressed Play and the opening bars of “Safe from Harm” chugged out around the room again. “Fantastic album, this. Much better than the follow-up—although that was pretty great, too.”
“Bit of an expert, then, are you?” I inquired. If he was that much of an expert on music, surely he’d have known who I was.
“Well, I know a lot about most things,” he replied shamelessly, grinning at me.
The first G&Ts slid down very easily, and Vinnie insisted on dashing off to the kitchen to replenish our glasses himself.
“I just love this house,” he kept saying to me.
During the second drink, I learned that Vinnie shared a place in Richmond with an Asian girl from a course he was taking; that he was twenty-seven; that he used to be a graphic designer but he’d gone back to college because he wanted to be an artist instead; and that, like me, he was an only child. He didn’t ask me anything about myself, not even what I did for a living, for which I was grateful.
By the time he’d rushed off to fix us a third gin, I was feeling very drunk. On the verge of being too pissed to either cook or want to eat, I decided that I’d better get back to my pasta and my orange sauce. Unsteadily, I followed him back into the kitchen.
Vinnie had his back to me. He was hunched over the little portable TV that lived on the end of the kitchen work surface, concentrating on something hidden by his shoulder. I wondered what he was doing—at first I thought he was writing, using the top of the television to lean on.
I studied the part of his profile visible to me: pale skin, one or two not-unattractive pockmarks, lovely cheekbones. Light from a halogen spotlight above him glinted off the lenses of his round tortoiseshell-rimmed glasses and filtered through his stubble. He was actually not as good-looking as I remembered him from the pub—his appeal came more from his sexual confidence than his physical attributes. He had wiry hair, which defied gravity and stood straight up, like Kramer’s from Seinfeld, and I could smell his aftershave from where I was leaning against the doorframe. At least he’d bothered to put aftershave on, even if he had skipped the actual shaving part.
I stood watching his thin back curved over in its black-and-white stripy T-shirt, and for a second I felt an overwhelming attraction to him.
Then I realized exactly what he was doing, and attraction turned to fury. He was chopping out two neat lines of cocaine—with my credit card, on top of my TV. I couldn’t believe it. All Sam’s words of warning came flooding back.
“What the hell do you think you’re playing at?” I said, outraged at his lack of manners and his presumption.
Cynthia Grant gave me that TV, I thought. She’d be horrified. It was an old, nasty little twelve-inch, encased in grimy white plastic, with a bunny-eared aerial that sat shakily on its top. She’d wanted me to have it when I first bought the house—it had been her own “kitchen telly,” but she said she had nearly sliced the tips of her fingers off by trying to watch soap operas and prepare meals at the same time, so please would I take it away? I’d laughed and said, “So I can slice my own fingers off?” but it had been in my kitchen ever since.
Vinnie had moved the bunny aerial down onto the worktop so as to have more room to maneuver. The cocaine he was expertly chopping out hardly showed up at all on the white surface, but this did not make it any more acceptable.
“How dare you do that in my house!” I spluttered. “Get out, now!”
Vinnie looked a picture of contrition.
“Oh, God, I’m so, so sorry. I had no idea you’d object. You just seem like such a cool person, I was sure you’d be into a little livener now and again. You know, special occasion and all that. I’m bang out of order, I know. If it upsets you, I’ll leave, now.”
He immediately swept the cocaine back into its white paper package, folded it safely into the corners, and put it back in his jeans pocket, before standing up to face me. He was hitching up his baggy jeans by the belt loops and shuffling from foot to foot like a guilty schoolboy, and I suddenly had the urge to put my arms around his hard waist. In my heels, I was about two inches taller than him, so he had to look up into my face.
“You don’t have to go. But I warn you, though, I won’t sleep with you,” I blurted, feeling foolish.
“Who said anything about sex?” he asked innocently, touching my breast lightly.
“Get off. And don’t even think about getting that stuff out again, do you hear me? I don’t do drugs, not even spliff, and I won’t have them in my house.”
“Awww. You’re such a spoilsport. You’ll have another G and T, though, won’t you, eh?” he said hopefully, turning back to his more legal supplies.
I couldn’t believe his nerve. It was extraordinary, but it just made me fancy him even more. I watched him clumping around in his heavy Doc Martens, whistling, opening and closing cupboards, crashing ice cubes from a tray, chopping more lemons, the hiss and fizz of the tonic bottle being unscrewed again.
I felt as if suddenly there had been a tilt, and it was I who had come to visit him in his house. It left me standing aimlessly, like an uncomfortable stranger amid my own familiarity, waiting for an invitation to be seated.
Vinnie flourished two more huge gin and tonics and a bowl of chips, and ushered me out of the kitchen back into the sitting room.
“I really think I should start dinner now,” I said weakly, wondering if perhaps this was all a bizarre dream.
“I don’t know about you,” Vinnie said, “but I’m actually not all that hungry now. We’re having such a laugh. What do you say we just keep drinking for a bit?”
As if under some spell—to think that I’d believed I could put a spell on him!—I found myself saying, “OK, well, if you don’t want to eat … I’m not very hungry now either.”
“Cheers,” he said, handing me my drink. We clinked glasses, and he smiled slowly, almost sheepishly. Later, after I got to know him better, I found out that it was the smile that meant, “Come on, play the game, I know you know what this is about.”
We gazed at each other for a long time, too long for there to be any doubt about what we both wanted. I must not sleep with him, not yet, I thought. But I was transfixed by the sexy curve of his lips, and the way his eyes held mine in a blatantly flirtatious way. I found myself wondering what his kisses would be like.
Vinnie got up to rifle through my record collection, running a commentary on its contents as he did so. “How can you admit to having a Bruce Springsteen CD? American jingoistic crap!” “Incredible! You’re the only person I know who has the Unknown Cases record!”
He put on a CD, listened to one track, took it off again, put on another. In between tracks he moved from sofa to armchair to the floor by my feet, where he briefly pleated the fringes of the rug, before hopping back up to the sofa, talking talking talking all the time, and chain-smoking.
“Get your shoes off the sofa,” I said when I could get a word in edgeways. “Why are you so bloody hyperactive?”
His familiarity with me was causing me to behave in an equally familiar way toward him. I didn’t recognize myself.
“Can’t help it. Must be my natural high spirits. Speaking of which,” he said, bouncing up from the sofa like Tigger in monochrome, “another drink?”
If he hadn’t sworn he wasn’t, I’d have said he was definitely high.
Once more he disappeared into the kitchen, grinning, without waiting for my answer.
Somehow the drinks got topped up more and more often without me noticing. The chips were reduced to a few greasy cru
mbs at the bottom of the bowl. It was only eight-thirty, and all ideas of dinner had gone out of the window.
Vinnie finally put Blue Lines on again, the third time I’d heard it that day. He turned the volume up full blast and pulled me out of my chair to dance, still talking nonstop: politics, music, architecture. Irrespective of his knowledge or lack of knowledge of a subject, it transpired that he always had to be right. He was goading me as we danced, trying to woo me into one of the interminable debates that came to characterize our relationship (besides the sex, that is).
“I can’t dance, talk, and drink at the same time,” I said. His smell and his weird accent pulled at me like a magnet. I will not sleep with him, I told myself. We were getting closer and closer together, laughing as we danced drunkenly around. I wanted him.
“Whoops,” I thought—or maybe I said it aloud. “You’d better go and get me another drink.”
I was drunk enough by then that I kept on dancing even when he was out of the room. All my familiar possessions—pictures, books, chairs—took on a different and jiggly appearance, as though they were my new dance partners. Vinnie came back with two half-filled glasses. “That’s the end of the gin,” he said, laughing.
“You’re joking!”
I stopped dancing and suddenly felt exhausted. “We’ve drunk the whole bottle?”
“Yup. Come on, let’s send it out in style. Down in one!” We clinked glasses again, swigging the remainder of the gin. The room started to spin and I had to hold on to Vinnie’s arm to keep steady. Massive Attack ended but we still swayed together, closer and closer until our heads touched. A hair from one of his wiry curls detached itself and found its way scratchily under my eyelid. I felt his erection press hard up against my thigh and I shivered with excitement. As I blinked the hair out of my eye, I ran my fingers lightly over his bare arm, feeling the contours of his little moles and goose bumps, squeezing a rough elephant’s trunk of loose skin at his elbow. My other hand traced the knob of his spine.
He told me that he broke his back, parachuting, during a youthful stint in the army. “I was lucky,” he said. “The person who jumped out of the plane after me was killed—his parachute didn’t open at all.”
I couldn’t imagine him being in the army; I bet he’d been useless—a sort of opinionated, bossy, male equivalent of Private Benjamin. I laughed at the thought and Vinnie kissed me. His tongue felt nice, firm and insistent, not skinny like the rest of him.
“Whoops,” I whispered again as we went blurrily upstairs to my bedroom, shedding garments en route.
I sobered up briefly in the middle of the sex, our limbs a flailing tangle on the bed. The undersheet had twisted itself sweatily off, exposing the little stitched peaks and valleys of mattress beneath it. My body was loving it while my mind yelled furiously at me to stop—but by that time, stopping was out of the question.
Afterward we both had to go and throw up in the toilet to rid ourselves of the lingering alcohol, and I felt that I was vomiting out more than just the gin. I was puking caution, good sense, discretion. I cleaned my teeth and stared at my face in the mirror; there were two bright red spots on my cheeks that could have been from sex or gin, but might also have been from shame.
When I got back to the bedroom, Vinnie rolled contentedly onto his back, as at home in my bed as he was in the rest of my house. He grinned at me.
“Do you realize we’ve just had an entire night’s events crammed into about three hours?” he said. “We’ve talked, danced, drunk a whole bottle of gin, shagged, puked, slept—and it’s only ten o’clock.”
He gave me a triumphant peck on the cheek and curled up to dream a victor’s dreams.
I looked at him, small and vulnerable without his glasses or his clothes; astonished at the evening’s events. It couldn’t have been me who’d just done that, surely: gotten drunk and had sex with a stranger. Thankfully it had been wonderful, but I had a nagging feeling that I’d had absolutely no choice in the matter. I wondered whether I should kick him out, or perhaps go and sleep in one of the spare rooms, but he looked all warm and soft and inviting, so I climbed back into bed with him instead.
He turned over with his back to me, so I was spooning him, and muttered sleepily, “You know, I’m a huge fan of yours.”
But by then it was too late.
THE DELECTABLE SANDIE
AFTER DAYS AND DAYS WHEN I’D BEEN UNABLE TO DO ANY writing at all, Cynthia’s visit spurred me back into it. Suddenly I found that I was actually getting close to finishing the manuscript. I estimated two more weeks of working several hours daily, and I’d be ready to do the show. Not, of course, that I’d actually be reading the magnum opus on air—how could I, in a two-hour show?—but it had to be complete, for me to leave behind as the explanation for my choice of music.
It was time to start thinking seriously about collecting the music. I wanted to be sure that I brought every single CD with me into the studio, just in case New World’s library couldn’t produce a copy. I wanted to leave nothing to chance.
As I conducted a detailed rummage through my CD collection, I wondered who the producer for the two A.M. show would be. I supposed it was too much to hope that it would still be Chrissie, my last breakfast-show producer. She was very professional, and, I’d thought, a lovely person, too—she’d been the only one to visit me more than once in hospital, although she hadn’t rung me since. She had probably gone on to much better things by now.
It would probably be better if I had someone awful, anyway. Some thick-skinned dim novice, who wouldn’t get upset when the press asked, “How could you not have known what state Helena was in?” and “Didn’t you think she was acting strangely?” Someone who could bask in his fifteen minutes of fame, as the last person to see me alive.
I made a tidy tower of CDs next to the fireplace, containing the majority of tracks I had planned for the show. I’d already bought All Mod Cons, which I realized must still be in my car somewhere, a painful reminder of that sunny, hungry, sick day when I bumped into Toby. I couldn’t help wondering how he was, and if I would be able to find his sister’s address, which was also on the floor of the car. I decided I’d look for it when I went out to retrieve the Jam CD.
A few of the other CDs I’d need were also missing: My copy of Tapestry by Carole King was nowhere to be found (I suspected Vinnie had half-inched it), and I realized that I had never owned The Sandie Shaw Supplement, “Wichita Lineman,” or any Happy Mondays records.
I rang round all the Richmond record shops to see what they had in stock and managed to reserve copies of Pills ‘n’ Thrills & Bellyaches, Tapestry, and 20 Greatest Hits of Country Music. Only the Sandie Shaw was missing now. But after ten minutes on the Internet, it was ordered, delivery time one to two weeks. Better not take any longer, I thought.
Even though I needed the album on CD, the original vinyl version, source of so much friction between Mum and Dad, would have done if all else failed. I decided to phone Dad to see if he still had it, as a backup in case the CD didn’t arrive in time. The record somehow felt like a bond between us.
Dad nearly fainted with surprise when he picked up the telephone to hear my voice.
“Hi, Dad, it’s me.”
“Helena, my honeypie! How the heck are you!”
I gritted my teeth with annoyance at his Southern twang. God knew where he’d picked it up from—my mother had managed to cling to her Home Counties vowels as if her life depended on them. An American accent was fair enough, after more than twenty years living in the country, but did he really need to sound as if he was just about to go out roping steer?
I was very fond of my father, but in an abstract way, the way one feels about having nicely manicured fingernails. He was a bit of a nonperson to me, really, a pipe-smoking appendage to my mother. In fact, the only time I could actually remember seeing him without her being there was in the early days of the band, when he had reluctantly come to one of our gigs (Mum had refused point-blank to come with him
, as she was sure that she would hate it, although she did grace us with her presence once or twice after we’d begun to get successful). Dad had stood at the side, flattened against the wall away from all the moshing high-school kids, sucking on his pipe and looking so uncomfortable that anyone would think that I had been performing a striptease onstage. Justin and Joe had spotted him and, mid-set, began a lugubrious rendition of a Sesame Street song: “One of us is not like the other ones.… ” I’d been mortified.
“I’m fine, Dad. In fact I’m going back to work soon.”
“Aw, that’s just fan-tastic! I’m real happy to hear that, honey. Me and your mom’s been so darn worried.”
I shuddered.
“We wish you’d just come on out here and visit awhile, Helena. Why, it must be over two years since I last saw you!”
This was how all our conversations went.
“But Dad, you’re always off on your cruises at Christmas, and you know how busy I … used to be with the radio show. You have to be there every day. You can’t just go on vacation whenever you fancy it, you know that. I wasn’t really well enough to come over before, and now I’m starting a new show. There’s nothing stopping you visiting me, is there?”
Dad hemmed and hawed. “Well, honey, it’s kind of hard this side, too, what with work, and me being chairman of the Country Club Society Committee.… Anyways, to what do we owe the honor of your call? Want to talk to your mother?”
“No, actually, Dad, I wanted to ask you something. I’m, um, getting some records together for my first show back on air, and I really want to play a Sandie Shaw track. You used to have it on vinyl, I remember it from when I was a kid. The album was called The Sandie Shaw Supplement.”
Dad laughed. “Oh my, I loved that record! As I recall, it featured the delectable Sandie spray-painted gold—lots of hair and a teeny chain bikini. Your mother disapproved.”
“Yeah, that’s the one. I’ve ordered it off the Net, but I’m worried it won’t arrive in time for my show. Do you still have it?”
