‘I really shouldn’t …’ I began, but I knew it was pointless. I’d lost all control over the evening. For once, though, the thought of being out of control didn’t terrify me.
We wound our way through the streets, dodging tipsy revelers as they weaved down the sidewalk, and ended up in front of an unpromising-looking blue door that led to an even less-appealing stairwell. ‘What is this place?’ I asked as we trudged down the steps.
‘You haven’t lived until you’ve been to Trish’s,’ he called over his shoulder.
A burly man met us at the foot of the stairs. ‘You two members?’ he asked gruffly.
‘Of course we are,’ Jackson said.
The burly man eyed us suspiciously. ‘I don’t think I’ve seen you in here before.’
‘C’mon, buddy. I’m sure you remember me,’ Jackson said, risking life and limb by giving the guy a playful pat on the shoulder. I readied myself to run.
He was not buying it. ‘Where’s your membership card?’
Jackson grinned widely. ‘C’mon, don’t tell me you don’t remember me!’
I was about to tug on Jackson’s arm and suggest we cut our losses and head to All Bar One when, incredibly, the burly man returned Jackson’s smile. ‘Sorry to give you hassle, mate,’ he said, ushering us in. ‘My memory’s been playing up. Can’t remember shit these days.’
‘Don’t worry about it,’ Jackson said, giving him another playful tap. ‘It happens to the best of us.’
‘Do you really know that guy?’ I whispered as we hurried past.
Jackson shook his head. ‘Never seen him before in my life.’
We pushed through a red velvet curtain and found ourselves in what appeared to be my uncle’s rec room from 1987. The place was lit more brightly than Wembley, and my feet stuck stubbornly to the tacky linoleum floor. A few scattered tables were filled with brawny Italian men arguing over the Serie A match playing on the flat screen tacked up to one of the walls, while over by the bar, a middle-aged woman wearing a Karen Millen skirt suit was arguing with the bartender over the amount of Jack in her Jack and Coke. ‘I can’t even taste it!’ she slurred, while a younger, nervous-looking co-worker tugged at her arm. A wizened old man played a mournful tune on a fiddle in the corner.
I turned to Jackson, eyes wide. ‘This place is nuts.’
He looked at me uncertainly. ‘Do you hate it? We can go if you do.’
‘It’s like we’re in Superman’s Bizarro World Soho,’ I said, gazing around in wonder. Where were the exposed brick walls? The tattooed struggling actor asking if we wanted to try the Bergamot small batch gin? The pouty fourteen-year-old taking photographs of her mac-and-cheese-stuffed lobster?
‘Is that a good thing, or …’
I nodded enthusiastically. ‘A good thing. A very good thing.’
Jackson looked as if I’d just given him a gold star. ‘Phew! What would you like to drink?’
I looked over at the bar, which appeared to stock solely Moretti or whisky. ‘Jack and Coke for me, please,’ I said. My eye snagged on a tall brown bottle tucked high up on the back bar. ‘Wait! I changed my mind. I’d like a Frangelico, please.’
He pulled a face. ‘I thought only little old ladies drank that stuff.’
‘Yeah, little old ladies with great taste. On ice, please!’
I stood back and observed the room, while Jackson sidled up to the bar. I would never in a million years have known this place existed. It definitely wasn’t somewhere Christopher and I would have ended up on our own. He had a general phobia of bouncers, and I tended to be too intimidated to approach them.
I didn’t use to be like that, though. There was a time in my life (between the ages of nineteen and twenty-one) when I would march to the front of any nightclub line, show the bouncer my cousin’s expired driver’s license, hitch up my pleather miniskirt and sail through the front door. And another (between the ages of twenty-two and twenty-four) when a Saturday night would begin at midnight, with Isla and me sailing over the Manhattan Bridge in a yellow taxi, the lights of the city twinkling just for us. We used to play this game where we’d compete to see who got the most phone numbers. Isla always won, but that wasn’t the point.
The point was that, back then, everything was expendable. Time. Sleep. Brain cells. Men. None of it mattered. Especially since I knew that it would just be for a finite amount of time, before I was called back to reality and forced to concentrate on more serious things. And then, just like that, the crazy nights out were packed up and pushed out of sight, like Christmas decorations in January. Only they weren’t ever meant to be seen again.
Jackson returned clutching a bottle of beer in one hand and a glass filled to the brim with a sticky-looking caramel-colored liquid. ‘Bottoms up,’ he said, handing the glass to me, and we clinked and sipped as we gaped around the room.
‘Honestly,’ I said, shaking my head in disbelief, ‘I have never seen a more random group of people gathered in one room before.’
‘I know,’ Jackson agreed. ‘And all of them look like they’re about to brawl, SummerSlam style.’
He was right. Everywhere we looked, people were making terrible choices. The thin man with the glasses glaring murderously at a man twice his size, insisting he spilled his drink: terrible choice. The Jack Daniel’s-loving skirt-suit wearer now running a hand up her nervous co-worker’s thigh: terrible choice. Even the surly bartender – questionably sober – was making a terrible choice by hitting on the bouncer’s girlfriend.
‘Must be the Jack Daniel’s,’ I said, taking another sip.
‘Or the Frangelico. How is it, anyway?’
‘Honestly? Sort of disgusting. But in a good way.’
‘How can something be disgusting in a good way?’
‘You know the way that cotton candy, or marshmallow fluff, when eaten in huge quantities, can be both delicious and disgusting? Like that.’
He laughed. ‘Thanks for clarifying.’ He looked around and shook his head. ‘My dad would love this kind of place.’
‘He would?’
‘Oh, sure. The man loves a dive bar. A genuine connoisseur. Whenever I’m home, he takes me to this place called Bucky’s he’s been going to since he could sneak a drink. You should see it – I swear you can smell the asbestos in the pipes. Bucky’s a real son of a bitch, too – never gives you a free drink, never smiles, never gives you the right change.’
‘Sounds awful.’
He grinned. ‘Oh, it is. But awful in a good way.’ We exchanged a glance and laughed.
A man in a waistcoat and suit jacket, bow tie loosened around his throat, appeared in the doorway and silently made his way to a dark corner of the room, where a grand piano had been unceremoniously shoved. ‘Do you think he’s going to play?’ I whispered.
Before Jackson had the chance to answer, the man sat down at the piano, cracked his knuckles with a flourish, and started banging out the opening bars to ‘New York, New York’.
‘I guess he’s a Sinatra fan,’ Jackson said with a wink. ‘So tell me, how did you end up in London? Don’t tell me it was just because good old Christopher lives here.’
I opened my mouth to protest, but was immediately drowned out by a rich baritone crooning about spreading the news. We looked back at the dark piano corner and found that both a microphone stand and a classically trained singer had appeared.
‘What in the—’ I looked at Jackson, goggle-eyed. ‘Did you know about this?’
He attempted a casual shrug, but couldn’t suppress the smirk. ‘Now that you ask, I seem to remember that actors from the West End sometimes come here after their curtain call, and sometimes turn this place into open mic night …’
We stood in awed silence as, one after another, people got up to the microphone and knocked it out of the park. The regulars barely even glanced up, and each performance was greeted with a smattering of applause and the occasional half-hearted whistle. Except for Jackson and me, of course. By the end of one woman’s per
formance of ‘All That Jazz’, my feet ached from stomping them and Jackson’s face looked like it was about to split down the seams under the pressure of his smile.
After a rousing final chorus of ‘Something Stupid’, Jackson excused himself and slipped off to the bathroom. When he reappeared, he had an odd look on his face, and kept tapping his foot anxiously against the back of the bar. ‘You feeling okay?’ I asked.
‘Me? Sure, I’m fine.’ He attempted a smooth smile, but I could hear the ice rattling in his glass as he held it to his lips.
I peered at him more closely. ‘Seriously, you look a little—’
A deep voice boomed across the room. ‘Is there a Miss Sparrow in the house?’
I spun on my heel and found the pianist leaning over the microphone, shielding his eyes from the light as he scanned the room. Fear gripped my ribcage and squeezed. I turned back to Jackson, eyes wide. ‘What does he want?’
Jackson winked. ‘I think he wants you to get up there and sing us a song, sweetheart.’
The bottom dropped out of my stomach and I wondered briefly if I’d be seeing that tiramisu again very soon. ‘What do you mean, he wants me to sing?’
Jackson couldn’t keep the grin off his face now. ‘You told me that night in Vegas that you’d always wanted to sing with a band. Well,’ he said, gesturing towards the pianist, now sighing impatiently into the microphone, ‘now’s your chance.’
‘But—’
‘I know it’s not exactly a band,’ he said, taking me by the elbow and steering me towards the microphone, ‘but I figured a piano was better than nothing.’
‘But – but—’
‘Don’t worry, sweetheart,’ he whispered as he delivered me to the pianist. ‘You’re going to knock them dead. This good man here is already cued up with your song. Isn’t that right?’
The pianist nodded solemnly and returned to his seat at the piano.
I was wild-eyed with fear now. What had I told him was my song? ‘My song? What song?’ My brain sped through the likely suspects. God, please don’t let it be a Beyoncé number. I’d never be able to hit the high notes.
The pianist tapped out the opening bars to ‘The Man Who Got Away’. ‘Good luck,’ Jackson whispered in my ear, and then he placed the microphone in my hand and disappeared into the crowd.
It felt like a dream, as if I was watching it happen to me from the other side of the room. I opened my mouth on the cue, and there it was, my voice, clear and high, and, if not good, at least not terrible. I closed my eyes and let the moment take me. The words came to me without thought, ingrained in my mind from hearing them so many times over the years. It was muscle memory, really. Pure and simple. No different from the hundreds of times I’d sung that song in the shower or in the kitchen or in my head as I pushed past angry fellow commuters. But at the end, when I’d sung my last note and the first wave of applause washed over me, I opened my eyes and realized, no, this wasn’t like every other time. This was a singular moment, and it was perfect.
I placed the microphone back in the stand with shaky hands and made my way across the floor to where Jackson was waiting, arms open and drinks waiting. People patted me on the back as I passed, and murmured the occasional nice word. I knew I wasn’t half the singer most of the people in there were, but it didn’t matter. What mattered was how I’d felt when I was up there.
‘I can’t believe you did that to me!’ I shouted as I ran up to Jackson. I tried to sound outraged, but I couldn’t wipe the enormous grin off my face.
‘Yeah,’ he said, placing a shot of tequila in my hand, ‘you really seemed like you were hating it up there. C’mon,’ he said, raising his shot glass in salute, ‘bottoms up.’ I sunk it in one as he watched, astonished but impressed. ‘You didn’t even ask for salt and lime!’
I tried to shrug casually through the burn racing down my esophagus. ‘Your turn,’ I crowed, nodding to the still-full shot glass in his hand.
He tipped it towards me in salute before sinking it in one neat swallow. ‘Christ,’ he said, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. ‘I hate tequila.’
‘Me too.’
‘You know,’ he said, putting his empty upside-down on the bar and signalling the bartender for a couple of beers, ‘you were pretty good up there.’
‘I was?’
‘In fact,’ he said, brushing the hair away from my face, ‘you were amazing.’
I froze as his fingertips grazed my neck. ‘How did you know?’
‘How did I know what? That you wanted to sing? I told you, you told me that night in Vegas.’
‘No,’ I said, catching his arm. ‘About the song. How did you know that was my song?’
He smiled. ‘You told me that, too.’
‘I did? But—’
‘I know,’ he said softly. ‘You told me you didn’t tell anyone that it’s your song.’
I was silent for a minute. ‘It’s my mother’s favorite. On Sundays, if she was having a …’ I hesitated, unsure of how much to say. He nodded his encouragement. ‘If she was having a good day, she’d make a big batch of popcorn and we’d cuddle up on the couch and watch old movies. A Star is Born was one of our favorites. Every time Judy Garland would get up to that piano and start to sing, she’d squeeze me and say, “That’s my song,” and then we’d sing it together. And then I guess it became my song, too.’ I looked up and saw that his eyes had filled with kindness and … yes. Understanding. I could feel it then, the words building inside me, pushing up my throat and easing my mouth open. I don’t know why, but something inside me wanted to tell him. ‘I took care of her for a long time,’ I said quietly.
He reached out and placed his hand lightly on my shoulder. ‘That must have been tough.’
I nodded. ‘I should still be taking care of her. I send money every month, but my aunt, she does most of the work now. Sometimes I think …’ I trailed off. I could see my mother’s face then, as clearly as if she were standing in front of me. The look in her eyes when she would sing that song, the way her smile never quite made its way up to her eyes.
Jackson bent down and cupped my face in his hand. ‘You’re a good daughter,’ he said quietly. ‘Your mother knows how much you love her.’
I felt a knot deep inside me ease. I waited for him to say more, but he stayed silent, just kept the steady pressure of his hand on my shoulder, and I felt almost weak with gratitude.
Jackson watched me closely. The adrenaline from earlier had worn off and had left me feeling brittle and tired. He put an arm around me and started guiding me towards the stairs without waiting for an answer. ‘Come on,’ he said, ‘let’s get you home. It’s a school night, after all.’
I nodded and let him lead me up the steps and back onto the Soho streets. It was the height of the witching hour now, and the scene was shaping up to look like something out of the zombie apocalypse. People staggered stiff-legged down the pavement, veering wildly to avoid passing bikes and taxis and lampposts. A woman in a red mini-dress and high red heels was singing a Rhianna song at the top of her lungs while her friends clapped along. A guy in his twenties wearing a shiny suit and sporting an elaborate quiff (Foxtons, almost certainly) was leaning against the side of a Pret A Manger, retching like a cat with a hairball.
Jackson raised his hand to flag a passing taxi. The night was over, and rightly so – like he’d said, it was a school night, and I had to be up early for work the next day. I couldn’t bring myself to look at my phone to check what the time was – I just knew that it was later than I’d thought. But something inside me, some treacherous, unhelpful little nugget buried deep in my chest, was disappointed. I didn’t want it to end, not yet. It had been too much fun.
‘Well,’ he said, as he opened the taxi door, ‘I guess this is goodnight.’
‘Do you want a lift? I could drop you off at your hotel …’
He waved the offer away. ‘I think I’ll walk for a little while. It’s not too far from here.’
‘Yo
u sure do love your walks.’
He nodded and gazed wistfully out over the Soho carnage. ‘Best way to remember this city is to walk it.’
‘At this rate, you’ll be Samuel goddamn Johnson by the end of this week.’ I looked at him for a minute, uncertain of what to do next after a night like we’d just had. Should we shake hands? Were we on hugging terms now? In the end, I sidestepped him and hurled myself lengthwise into the taxi. ‘Okay,’ I called, straightening myself up in the seat. ‘Well. Bye.’
He leaned into the taxi and laughed. ‘You’re not too good at this whole human interaction thing, are you?’
‘I’m a little rusty,’ I admitted.
He stepped halfway into the cab and bent down to kiss me on the cheek. ‘Goodnight. Sleep tight. Don’t let the bed bugs bite. I’ll call you tomorrow with a plan.’ He shut the door behind him and I felt the taxi jerk into motion as it sped off down the street.
I glanced at him in the rear-view mirror. He was checking his phone, lifting it to his ear … the penny dropped with a thud. Of course he wasn’t just going for a walk. He was probably going to meet someone. He’d lived here before, he probably knew loads of people. I wondered, idly, if any of them were particularly pretty.
‘Where to?’ The taxi driver’s voice shook me out of my thoughts.
‘Oh. Um. Tufnell Park, please.’ I leaned back in the seat and let the night wash over me. I felt as if I’d seen a whole new London, one I hadn’t even known existed. What had I been doing these past three years? I couldn’t blame Christopher for it, either. My first six months in London, he’d bombarded me with links to gigs and theatre events and hot new bars, but I always said no. I’d rather stay in, I told him. But really, I just wanted to hide. Going out like that was in the past for me. Now that I was settled down, that meant home-cooked meals and cosy duvets and smug nights in watching Saturday-night television.
Stop it, I chastized myself. I was being ridiculous. Jackson pours one decent macchiato down my throat and thrusts a microphone in my hand and suddenly I’m Virginia goddamn Woolf, yearning for a room of my own. Anyway, didn’t I have enough excitement on my plate at the minute, what with the possibility of polygamy winking at me in my future?
Jenny Sparrow Knows the Future Page 15
