by Celina Grace
“That’s so cool,” murmured Janey, her head on my shoulder. All three of us were sat on the one wide seat in the front of the hearse. I thought about getting in the back, to lie where the coffin would normally go – to be delivered to Blue Turner and his bandmates like a freshly stolen corpse – I thought I could lie with my arms crossed over my chest and my eyes shut - the thought was so hilarious I was almost hiccupping with giggles, but by the time I began to get up, to move through suddenly soupy air to actually do it, the car was slowing and stopping and we were parked in front of the manor.
Janey and I tumbled out of the car. I looked up at the monolith of golden stone before me with my mouth hanging open. It was huge – huge – I can’t even convey how big it was. It was like a mountain, set all over with glittering windows. I turned slowly on my heel, my foggy gaze sweeping over the driveway, the gardens, the fountain in front of the house. I looked more closely at the fountain and blinked. It was filled with water and there were load of little black stubs poking up from the surface. Race got out the car, stretched and went over to the fountain. He leant over and pulled at one of the stubs, hoisting out a dripping bottle of champagne.
“Welcome to Asharton Manor,” said Race, stretching his arms out wide. Drops of water fell from the champagne bottle in his hand, darkening the dust at his feet.
“Oh man,” I heard Janey whisper beside me. I said nothing but I put an arm around her and pulled her into a semi-hug. Her hair, longer than mine by about a foot, fell against my arm in a silky curtain.
“Come on, girls,” called Race. He was loping up the steps to the enormous front door of the manor, which stood ajar.
Janey and I wobbled after him. As we got closer, I could see that many of the windows were actually broken, the panes cracked or smashed completely or just gone, black rectangles gaping like missing teeth in a jaw. Dark stains had run down the golden walls of the house in places, where elsewhere it was green with mould. Small plants flourished in the old iron drainpipes. I looked down and beneath my feet the old flagstones of the terrace were crumbling away. I blinked. Perhaps I was still a bit too stoned but it felt for one instant that Janey and I were entering a building that was on the verge of falling in on itself.
After a moment, I told myself not to be so stupid. We walked up the cracked steps to the front door and through the dark gap of the doorway. A part of me was still expecting all of this to be an elaborate joke – we couldn’t really be going to meet Blue Turner, could we? It was like a fairy tale; the two maidens walking through the forest, the fairy tale castle in the clearing, the handsome prince inside. Hardly maidens, I thought to myself, sniggering quietly. We followed Race through the massive hallway, the black and white tiles cracked and broken beneath our feet, filthy with dust and dirty footprints and unidentifiable drips and stains splattered all over them. The hallway seemed a hundred foot high, dust motes caught in a beam of light from a window. Race gestured to us to come up the stairs, which split in two and flowed around the upper stories of the house. Janey kept stopping to look around her and murmuring low sounds of incredulity. I had the feeling she’d forgotten that we were about to meet the lead singer of Dirty Rumours, so distracted had she been by the house. I hadn’t forgotten. That knot of excitement in my stomach twisted even tighter.
We reached the first floor. The corridor had bare floorboards, which were actually missing here and there. We stepped gingerly over the gaps. If you looked down, you could see the checkerboard floor of the hallway, uncomfortably far below. There was very little furniture, just a broken down old chair over by the tall window at the front, but as we walked along what felt like a mile of corridor, I saw firstly an old grandfather clock and then, up a bit further, a suit of armour, dull and rusting. Someone had put a massive unsmoked joint in the facemask, where the knight’s mouth would have been. Janey and I burst out laughing and Race reached up and swiped it as we walked past.
The door on the end of the corridor stood ajar. I could hear music, voices… smoke coiled and billowed from open doorway, writhing blue ribbons caught in the sunlight that lanced through the dirty, broken windows of the corridor. Race shouted “Blue? Got visitors for you.”
“If it’s Merian, tell her to fuck off. I’m busy.”
The dark, hoarse voice that came from the room made Janey and me look at each other in half-terrified glee. We’d heard that distinctive low drawl a million times before, at concerts, on vinyl, on television. By that time, we were at the door and Race pushed it further open and we were in the room.
It was huge and dim, with the curtains pulled over the large windows at the front and for a second, I couldn’t see a thing through the smoke. Blinking, I followed Race through the haze until it cleared enough to for me to see what was in front of me. There was a large bed – a real four poster bed – the sides hung with grubby red velvet curtains. Arranged around the bed were a variety of low slung chairs and sofas and a chaise-longue, upholstered in the same red velvet as the curtains. Every flat surface in the room was crowded with bottles, cans, glasses, ashtrays and small plastic bags. Sprawled on the bed, a guitar in his hands and a white-scored mirror by his side, was Blue Turner.
It was indisputably him. I think a part of me had been thinking that Janey and I were being fooled, elaborately hoaxed: we couldn’t really be going to meet the lead singer of Dirty Rumours, could we? Things like that didn’t happen to us. But it really was him – thinner than I’d expected but just as handsome; hair a luxuriant tangled mane, bare-chested, dressed only in a pair of gold silk trousers.
I was so thrown by being in the general vicinity of one of my idols that it took me a moment to realise that there were other people in the room. There were two men sat next to one another on one of the sofas. One was reading an old-fashioned looking book and the other had his head tipped back against the sofa cushions. It took me another few seconds to notice the girl knelt before him, her head making bobbing motions in front of his groin.
My eyes bulged and I quickly looked away. I heard Janey gasp. I couldn’t stop my gaze from being drawn back to the girl and what she was doing. The man – I recognised him as the lead guitarist from Dirty Rumours, Wade Bower– had his mouth open in what I first thought was ecstasy before realising a moment later that he was actually fast asleep. As soon as I’d clocked this, the girl herself seemed to realise she was wasting her time and sat back, with an aggrieved snort. I bit the side of my cheek to stop myself laughing out loud. The girl – she was little and thin, with a cloak of long blonde hair – got to her feet and flounced from the room, her hair fluttering behind her like a ragged golden flag. The man sat next to Wade looked over at his sleeping companion without interest and threw a cushion over his gaping fly and its contents.
“No one needs to see that at this time of day,” I heard him murmur before turning his attention back to his book. I realised he was another band member, the drummer, Cody Brown. I caught a glimpse of the title of the book he was reading: Death at the Manor by Joan Hart. It rang a very faint bell and after a moment I realised I’d read it myself, at Aunty Viv’s house, all those many years ago.
What with all this drama, my attention had been drawn from Blue Turner. I realised he was actually speaking to us – or rather to Janey – and beckoning us over to the bed. I drifted over in what was almost a haze. The remnants of the joints I’d smoked in the car with Race, the pot smoke that hung heavily in the air of the room, even the plaintive, melancholy notes that Blue’s fingers were conjuring from his guitar – all contributed to the air of being trapped in a waking dream.
“So, ladies,” said Blue, his eyes on his slowly moving fingers. “Take a pew.” Janey and I sat on the bed, a little hesitantly. Janey carefully moved the mirror that was dusted with train tracks of white powder away from her leg. “What are your handles?”
I sat with my back up against one of the posts of the bed, hard against the bones of my spine. “I’m Eve and this is Janey.” I felt another rush of light-headedn
ess as I spoke. I was talking to Blue Turner. Actually talking to him. It was just too weird.
Blue looked up and grinned lazily. His dark blue eyes were bloodshot and he smelt of cigarette smoke and the narcotic, pungent reek of patchouli oil. “Want a drink? Race—“ he looked around for his tour manager who was already making his way over to the bed with brimming glasses of champagne. “Hey, great. Drink up, girls. So you love Dirty Rumours, yeah?”
Janey went faintly pink. “We love you guys,” she murmured. “Firebird Lullaby is just about my favourite song, ever.”
Blue looked at her, smiling. “That was the very first song I ever wrote, about my first love. First love – the intensity, the transcendence…” He lowered his head a little and strummed the first four chords from the song. Then he raised it and looked at Janey again. “She looked like you.”
Janey looked up, alarmed and pleased. I watched their gaze meet and meld, and looked away, chugging back my champagne. It wasn’t the first time a man had picked Janey over me – she was much prettier than me, the bitch. But I had more personality. That was what I told myself the first time it happened. Too much personality, I sometimes thought. Too much for men to handle. But I would have thought a rock star would have been man enough to take me on. I tipped back the last of my drink and tried not to mind too much. Janey was sweet and I should be happy for her.
“A girl who appreciates the finer things in life,” said Race, leaning against the post that I was leaning on.
It was only the second time I’d ever tasted champagne. I could feel it going straight to my head, and was glad. I concentrated and managed to raise just one eyebrow at him.
“My mother always said, ‘champagne tastes and beer pockets’,” I said and was rewarded with his laugh.
“We’ve got plenty of both,” Race said, “But I’d recommend you stick to the good stuff.” With that he topped up my glass again. I turned back to face Blue and realised Janey was now sitting next to him and he was murmuring something in her ear, making her giggle.
“You guys should stick around,” said Blue, finally turning his gaze to me. “We could do with some fresh company, couldn’t we, guys?”
There was a ‘yeah’ from Race, nothing from the unconscious Wade and a snort from the seated Cody. I looked over at him and he looked straight back at me, a strange mixture of sneer and smile on his face. Emboldened by the champagne, I gave him a wink and after a moment, he smiled, reluctantly. He gave me a tiny nod, as if I’d just passed some sort of test.
“We don’t want to be a hassle,” I said. Blue shook his head lazily and reached for a small silver pot on the bedside table.
“You won’t be,” he said, unscrewing the lid. He tipped out a small mound of white powder onto the dusty mirror and held it out to Race. Race extended his little finger, the one with the long curving nail, and lifted a scoop of powder to his nose.
Race scraped the power into lines with the side of a beer mat and passed the mirror to me, along with a straw. I hesitated. What was it? I had tried speed before and hadn’t much enjoyed the experience. What if it was heroin? But I had the impression that you didn’t snort heroin… not wanting to appear naïve, I put the straw to one nostril and tentatively inhaled.
The sting and burn of the powder hitting my nostril made me blink and recoil. Blue and Race burst out laughing.
“I can see you girls have a lot to learn,” said Race and he sat down on the bed next to me.
It seemed endless, that afternoon. At one point – I think it was when we were all sprawled around the swimming pool – I remember thinking this is something I’ll remember forever. When I’m old, I’ll always have this memory to look back on. It will never leave me. My bare feet were dangling in the water, warm as a bath, moving silkily in little wind-roughened wavelets over my toes. The rest of me was lying on an old silk counterpane, peppered with moth holes and smelling dustily sweet. I had my head on Race’s bare shoulder and the smoke from our two cigarettes rose above us, twining together like opaque blue vines.
Blue was talking about energy, about synergy and life force, and how music could be a force for good or a force for evil. But what was evil, he was asking, who was it who could make that moral judgement? His hoarse, thrilling voice was the soundtrack to that afternoon; his words and his songs. Janey lay beside him, her legs thrown over his. She was wearing her white cheesecloth dress, not the dress she’d worn when she arrived at the manor, but obviously one she’d thrown over her nakedness when she and Blue had finally emerged from his bedroom. She quite clearly had nothing on underneath. Who was this Janey, who seemed to have shed her inhibitions along with her clothes? Her long blonde hair was spread like a fan, falling over the dirty pillow that her head rested on and trailing onto the flagstones that surrounded the swimming pool.
The pool itself had been another delightful surprise. When Blue and Janey had actually begun necking on the bed right in front of me and the others, I had frozen with embarrassment. From what I’d read about Blue, he was quite capable of making love to a woman in full public view. All the while I was chastising myself for being such a square, the other half of me was just frantic to get out of that room. I was fuddled with the champagne and the cocaine – it had been cocaine – and I just could not decide what would be more embarrassing – having to sit through Blue and Janey having sex or running out of the room. Race had been sitting close and rubbing my leg and I suddenly realised that, if I wasn’t careful, I was going to be right in the middle of an orgy. It was a bit of a revelation to me, then – the fact that maybe I wasn’t so unconventional after all.
It was Cody who saved me. In the midst of the panting and groping from Blue and Janey and Race’s hand creeping up my leg, I suddenly realised he was standing right next to me and speaking to me quietly.
“Hey, Eve. It is Eve, yeah?” I nodded, still rigid with apprehension. “I’m Cody. Do you fancy coming for a walk with me? See around the place?”
I nodded again quickly. He smiled and held a hand out to me. I scrambled off the bed, dislodging Race’s hand. I smiled at him apologetically, thinking that I mustn’t offend him, but to my surprise, he got up too.
“Good idea, Cody,” he said, so easily that for one moment I didn’t hear the undercurrent of antagonism in his voice. It was there and gone so fast that I almost missed it. “Let’s show our guest around. Leave these two to it.”
The three of us walked to the door of the bedroom. Janey and Blue were oblivious to our departure, locked in each other’s arms as they were. Cody paused for a moment before we left the room and said, “Wade. Wade.”
Wade slept on. I bit down on a giggle again. “Oh, for God’s sake,” Cody said crossly and then we all turned and left the three of them to it.
The pool was the last thing that the guys showed me. We started off by walking back down the stairs to the hallway of the manor and through the doors to the right. They were huge and creaked on their massive hinges like wailing banshees. Behind them was a massive room, empty except for a few sofas and chairs and a huge drum kit.
“This is my room,” said Cody with satisfaction. “Look up.”
I thought I hadn’t heard him properly and turned to him with raised eyebrows. He repeated himself and indicated, with a pointed finger, what I should be looking at. I turned my eyes to the ceiling and gasped. There was a huge, faded mural painted there, covering the entire ceiling: blue sky and pink clouds and golden cherubs. It was still fantastic, even though the plaster was peeling off in places and the corners were blotched with damp.
“Hey man, we really need to drop some acid and lie down here and watch that ceiling,” said Race, staring up at it. “That would be a trip. I can’t believe I’ve only just thought of that.”
Cody didn’t answer him. He was watching me, gauging my reaction.
“That is so cool,” I said. “It’s like something by Michelangelo.”
Cody grinned, clearly pleased. “Had a feeling you’d dig it.”
“I really do. This place is so amazing.”
Cody rolled his eyes. “Asharton Manor, my darling, is the original white elephant. It’s falling down around our ears. But you can’t tell Blue that. He loves the place. I don’t think he’s left it since he bought it a year ago.”
We had walked through the mural room by this time and were following a maze of little corridors that led off into rooms large and small. The floor was treacherous, with gaping holes in the boards at regular intervals. On the skirting boards I could see pale clumps of some type of fungus. The small windows were blackened with dirt and age and so little light came through that it made it difficult to see. At one point, my foot went through the floor, the wood beneath my sandal sole collapsing like cardboard, and I let out a short sharp scream. Race caught me around the waist, and this time I was glad.
“Let’s go outside,” said Cody. “We do actually have a couple of new things here, believe it or not.”
The first of those new things turned out to be the old stable block. When we stepped inside, I could see that the old stalls where horses had once stamped and shuffled had been transformed into a fully equipped recording studio. Guitars stood propped on their stands and there was an enormous bank of recording equipment that looked like something you’d launch a rocket with.
I wandered around, hugging my arms across my body. This was where it all happened – this is where the magic was produced. I was thrilled. I reached a tentative finger to touch one of the microphones, hanging from the ceiling like a bulbous black insect.
“This is why Blue never leaves,” said Cody, watching me walk around. “He’s got everything he needs right here. Even up to—“
He suddenly fell silent and I turned to look at him, surprised by his change of tone. He dropped his eyes to the floor and Race made a sudden sound, what sounded like a grunt of exasperation. There was an odd little moment of tension that rang like a bell in the silent room.
