The Singer

by Cathi Unsworth

  Robber and Allie were well up for it, but Sylvana couldn’t face any more. Now the euphoria of the gig had passed, she felt cold and exhausted, all her emotions used up, and crying out for sleep.

  Luckily, Robin felt the same. He excused them both, and led the way up the stairs. Both the room and bed looked big enough for a toddler, their bedding a couple of sleeping bags and an ancient, orange and purple bedspread, the temperature a steep drop from the packed, sweaty pub.

  And it dropped another couple of degrees the moment Robin shut the door.

  ‘I’ll sleep on the floor then, shall I?’ he said.

  Sylvana, about to flop onto the zed-bed, looked up sharply.

  His eyes had gone to pinpoints. A little tic was working up and down on his left cheek, something Sylvana had never seen before.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean,’ his voice was a hiss, ‘you’ll no want me in your bed tonight, will ye? Not when there are so many other men you’d like to be sharing it with.’

  Sylvana felt her mouth open, but she was too shocked to make any sound come out of it.

  ‘I mean,’ Robin’s voice rose up a notch, ‘you’d probably rather have Ray Spencer up here with ye, wouldn’t ye? Or maybe,’ he cocked his head to one side, put on a mocking tone, ‘you’d prefer that wee wanker of a promoter to come up and twiddle with yer dials. Ye certainly couldn’t take yer eyes off him, now, could ye?’

  ‘Robin,’ Sylvana whispered, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  But Robin was getting louder as his face got darker, until his whipcord body was actually shaking with rage.

  ‘Or any of those students, those stupid wee fanzine writers, all those guys that were clamourin’ for ye tonight, eh? Maybe ye could do the lot of ’em, eh, one after the other, is that what ye’d like, ye filthy bitch?’

  He spat the last word right into her eye and she crumpled on the floor in front of him. Sobs wracked through her body, spontaneously, hysterically. She couldn’t believe what she was hearing. Her gentle Robin, transformed into this snarling, twisted monster. The shock was as intense as falling into an ice bath.

  He stood above her for a few moments, watching her reduced to a snivelling wreck, a bundle of rags on the floor.

  Then suddenly, he was there beside her, his arms around her.

  ‘Oh my God, Sylvana, I’m so sorry, forgive me, I don’t know what came over me, Jesus, I don’t know what I’m saying.’ Words tumbled out of him in rapid succession as he tightened his grip.

  Her first instinct was to pull away, smack him in the mouth, run.

  But then she realised he was crying too.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she heard herself say, though she couldn’t work out why she was saying it. ‘Please don’t cry, Robin, I’m sorry.’

  ‘No, I’m sorry, hen, I’m a bastid, I’ve got a wicked temper and I thought I could control it, but just somethin’ snapped inside me tonight, I don’t know why. Oh God, please help me, you’re the last person on earth I want to do this to.’

  And he continued to cry, sobbing long into the night, while Sylvana lay frozen in his arms, wondering what the hell it was that she had done wrong.

  17

  Two Sides To Every Story

  February 2002

  Lynton Powell was surprisingly upfront when it came to the question of drugs. ‘I was pretty young, pretty confused, and a lot of mad things had happened in my life over a very short period of time,’ he said, with a wry smile. But he never lost eye contact for a second.

  ‘It’s a shockingly easy thing to get into when you’ve already been sliding towards it for a couple of years without realising,’ he explained. ‘The environment we were in then, everyone was doing drugs anyway – speed when you were on the road, before you did a gig, pot and weed to relax afterwards, or while you were in the studio, or when you wanted to come up with another profound idea for a song. It wasn’t such a big thing to swap smoking reefer for something that made life seem even easier. And as no doubt you’ve heard every junkie in history say – when you start to dance with it, it does make life seem a whole lot easier.

  ‘I was always shy, I never liked being under scrutiny,’ he considered, ‘even when journalists generally only had good things to say, ’cos I always thought I never had anything particularly interesting to say back to them. H just took away that worry. I stupidly thought that with its help, I could just concentrate on the important thing, the music. You gotta remember as well, all my heroes had been through their own personal romance with the stuff. If I’m being honest, I thought I was being like Miles, that I was gonna go places far outside normal, straight, boring people’s existences and report back from the amazing new worlds I’d discovered out there.’ He gave a short laugh. ‘A common enough misconception.’

  I nodded sympathetically, hiding the rush of relief and excitement that he hadn’t taken this turn in the conversation badly, because the next question was ultimately just as awkward.

  ‘So do you not blame Vince for getting you hooked? A lot of other people seemed to…’

  Lynton lit a cigarette, took a puff then lifted it up in front of my nose.

  ‘See this?’ he said. ‘This little white stick here is a hundred times harder to stop doing than H was. I can blame him for this, most probably, ’cos at some point in our murky past when we were spending our life on a tour bus, I took one of these bastards from him purely to see if it would stop me feeling bored. But anything else that I did was my fault and my responsibility. And,’ he flashed that wry smile at me again, ‘I’m still here and he ain’t.’

  This raised a chuckle from Gavin.

  Lynton rested his cigarette back down in the ashtray, a beautiful black and gold chunk of glass that looked more like a modern art sculpture than something you should put a fag out in. He meshed his long fingers together in a reflective pose. ‘What else?’ he asked mildly. ‘Don’t worry, Eddie. Ain’t nothing that’s off limits to me.’

  I sensed that maybe he was saying the opposite of what he meant here, but I carried on regardless.

  ‘What about Sylvana?’ I asked. ‘Was it her who changed everything? I’m trying to get some sense of what she was like…’

  Lynton unlinked his fingers in a graceful flourish and picked up the cigarette again. He closed his eyes as he inhaled, then blew the smoke out slowly.

  ‘You ever heard of amour fou?’ he asked.

  I shook my head.

  ‘Mad love. That’s the French expression for it, which is sadly appropriate, as it goes. Well. That Sylvana, man, she wasn’t what you’d call mad, but she wasn’t really all there, if you know what I mean. D’you ever listen to her music?’

  I didn’t want to admit I’d spent more time looking at her picture than actually taking in the content of the albums I’d managed to acquire so far. But I got the general drift of it. So I said: ‘Well, she doesn’t make a lot of sense, lyric-wise, and the music is pretty away with the fairies.’

  Lynton nodded. ‘Well, there you go. That explains her really. She was pretty out there. Not in the way that Vince was, though, that’s why we all thought it was kind of a strange attraction. He was crazy in an aggressive, confrontational way; he liked getting a rise out of people. She was more the type that always had these mystical “feelings” that she had to “go with”, pretty much a hippy really. Which was why it did seem kind of strange to us that Vince would get so besotted with her so quickly.’

  ‘Yeah, well, that was all a put-on if you ask me,’ said Gavin. ‘That little girl lost bit. She dumped her boyfriend quick enough and they’d been in that band together for years.’

  ‘True,’ Lynton nodded amiably, ‘and Vince dropped his girlfriend just as quick, who he’d been with even longer. It ain’t really fair to judge her on that.’

  I clocked Gavin’s scowl out of the corner of my eye.

  ‘But what it was about her that really fucked things up,’ Lynton carried on, oblivious, ‘was the effect her
ditzy behavior had on Stevie. Stevie couldn’t stand her, man, he really could not stand her. The thing was, I think, that Stevie had always had Vince’s full attention up to that point. I mean, I love Stevie and I always will; he’s my Paddy soul brother from way back, but within that band there had always been kinda like two factions. Me and Kevin: the swotty ones, always staying up late to try out new chords and write new songs; and him and Vince, Los Banditos.

  ‘Vince’s first girlfriend, Rachel, she was always there, like, but she was always in the background, even when we was sharing that squat together up the hill,’ he waved his arm in a northerly direction, then swooped it down to put his cigarette out. ‘And when we was on tour, forget about it, he weren’t thinking of her at all. So Stevie lost his alley-cat pulling partner, and for the first time since we’d been together, Vince’s interest wasn’t fully focused on the band. He’d changed. If you look at the records and the interviews we did from that point on, you’ll notice that Vince became Vincent. It was probably a combination of the drugs and Sylvana, to be honest, but he was starting to take himself a lot more seriously.

  ‘That’s what fucked Stevie up, man, and that’s why he always deals with it by twisting it round that because of Sylvana meeting Vince, I became a junkie. And no doubt he’ll tell you that exact same thing when you meet him. I’ve had the argument with him a million times myself and it still don’t work. We just leave it now,’ he said with a chuckle, ‘that we’ve just remembered things differently, that’s all.

  ‘And my man Gavin here,’ he leaned over and gave the photographer a hearty slap on the knee, ‘he remembers it differently again, right?’

  ‘Yeah, right, mate,’ Gavin laughed back. ‘I remember it clearly. As seen through the bottom of a glass.’

  That was just about the end of the interview, though we stayed around so that Gavin could take a few new shots afterwards of Lynton looking debonair on the sofa, with that beautiful ashtray arranged in front of him on the coffee table. He and Gavin laughed and joked throughout the clicks and poses; that little crackle of tension that had risen between them now lost on the breeze. I flicked through my notes one more time as they were composing themselves and realised I’d left out one important one. I saved it until Gavin had finished and was stashing his gear back into his camera bag.

  ‘Lynton, do you mind me asking one last thing?’

  ‘Sure, man, go ahead.’ Lynton was standing up now, ready to see us out, picking up his cigarettes and putting them back into his pocket.

  ‘Do you know whatever happened to Don Dawson?’

  All afternoon we’d been talking about some pretty heavy things – heroin addiction, racism, Bible-bashing fundamentalist Yanks – and Lynton had answered all my questions with good grace and what seemed like genuine honesty. But for the first time then, I saw something flicker over the bass player’s smooth countenance, a storm cloud, a flinching in his eyes, like somebody had just stood on his foot. A little trace of pain.

  ‘Yeah I do, poor bastard,’ he said quietly. ‘He died, just over two years ago, on Christmas Day, as it goes. In a nursing home, back in Hull.’

  Lynton stared past me, out of the tinted windows and beyond. ‘He had Alzheimer’s, they reckoned. He’d been slowly losing it for years. Big Bad Don, the Cock of the North, he was nothing but a tiny shell, in the end. It was kind of hard to believe…’

  I don’t think Gavin had caught any of this part of the conversation, because he came up to Lynton at that point, with his coat back on and his bag over his shoulder, right hand outstretched.

  ‘Thanks again, mate, I’ll send you the contacts for these,’ he said. ‘If you want any printed up, just let me know.’

  Lynton came back to reality sharpish, grabbed hold of Gavin’s palm and shook on it.

  ‘That’d be great, Gavin, and I’ll get you a copy of the new CD, once I’ve finished polishing it. You know it’s gonna be—’ they shared what was obviously an old joke, finishing the sentence together ‘—the shit!’

  They fell about then, slapping each other on the back.

  ‘Oh, and Stevie’s definitely back next week,’ Lynton added, like he’d only just remembered. ‘I’ve got to put the bastard up for a week. So I’ll make sure he spares a bit of time for you, make sure you get your story. Eddie,’ he turned to me, ‘it was a pleasure meeting you. Good luck stitching this all together, mate, and even better luck selling it.’

  I realised this was officially the end of proceedings now and shook his outstretched hand vigorously. ‘Thanks, Lynton, that’s really great. Thanks for being so open.’

  As if by magic, the lovely Shanice appeared at the exit door, beckoning us very politely to leave.

  Out into the cold, dim twilight, the streetlights blinking on as we left the enclave and started back up Oxford Gardens. Lights switched on behind the net curtains of the little houses too, shadowy figures moving inside. Still no one out on the street itself, nothing to give the game away.

  Gavin clapped his hands together, a great big grin all over his face. He was clearly delighted at having seen his old friend.

  ‘Got time for a quick one, mate?’

  I had promised Louise that I wouldn’t be back late. But now there was a dull ache inside my stomach, the knowledge that I’d never get to meet one of the people I’d really wanted to talk to for the book. A knot that twisted with the knowledge that Gavin had inadvertently cut short something really interesting that Lynton was about to say.

  Only one way to untie it.

  ‘That sounds like a plan to me.’

  It was a plan that cost me. I did get a cab home that night, even though by eleven o’clock the lure of Gavin’s sofa and another rummage through his video collection was considerably stronger. I was greeted with a plate of incinerated pizza, left poignantly on top of the oven and a shut bedroom door that Louise had wedged the sideboard up against from the inside. When I tried to get in, gentle words drifted through the woodwork: ‘Fuck off, Eddie.’

  Back on the sofa again, so soon.

  It took about a week to put that one right, a bloody expensive week. I ended up forking sixty quid for a pair of black suede stiletto boots and then another ton on a meal in some poncy Japanese restaurant in Fitzrovia after taking milady for a trip to the cinema.

  As a result of which I didn’t get the time to go through my Lynton tapes before Gavin was ringing up to say that we were meeting Steve Mullin.

  Gavin was really excited about this next interview. I don’t think the two of them had seen each other since that album of re-releases five years ago. He wanted me to come over the night before so we could go over everything I was going to say, watch the old videos again, and go through all our cuttings.

  This time I told Lou I would probably be out for a couple of days.

  ‘Why don’t you just move straight into Arlington House and cut out the middle man?’ was her reply.

  We were meeting Steve in the Earl of Lonsdale on Portobello Road at lunchtime on a Thursday. By midnight on Wednesday we were listening to Butcher’s Brew for about the sixth time. I had become fixated on one track in particular, probably because Lynton had mentioned it as epitomising the height of his skag experimentalism – he had been playing his bass while he was out of it and had stumbled across this rhythm that had actually made him feel seasick, as if the notes were propelling his stomach up and down on waves. It had something to do with how low the notes were as well as what order they were played in. He became obsessed with reproducing it on the album; he wanted to make a song that could possibly induce the listener to vomit, so that they could appreciate where Lynton was coming from while he had created it.

  Vince, naturally, had loved this idea, and, having shared the same batch that had caused Lynton’s revelation, understood exactly the comment his bassist was trying to make. They had just come off a disastrous tour of the States, where they’d nearly got lynched by Klansmen in Birmingham, Alabama, and the singer chanelled his own sick disgust at the
m into Lynton’s nauseous rhythm.

  They called the song ‘Retch’ in the end, though they had toyed with ‘Kan the Klan’. It had just been the two of them on the finished track – Lynton had added some loose percussion that sounded like random, muffled thumping, like someone being beaten up in a room up the stairs, then fashioned an eerie motif to recall the Deep South on a Dobro guitar he had just been learning to master.

  It was fucking brilliant.

  I went to sleep with Vince’s plaintive wail echoing round in my head: ‘Spelt your name in beer on a bar in ’Bam/Sign of a Southern gentleman/Who waits until dark to come out and creep/Fat and afraid wrapped up in a sheet/Flames in the night light a slug’s trail/Safety in numbers for the mentally frail/I’ll show you the light of my purifying fire/Burn your pork flesh on my funeral pyre/Retch you wretch/Die, die!’

  I dreamed about men with pig’s heads marching round holding flaming crosses and woke to the smell of frying bacon.

  Gavin was humming away to himself in the kitchen, brewing up coffee and piling a ginormous fry-up onto two plates when I staggered in, feeling pretty wretched myself.

  ‘Do you ever have a hangover?’ I enquired, wedging myself into a chair round the table and reaching for the orange juice.

  ‘Not in living memory.’ Mine host slapped down a plate full of bangers, bacon, fried bread, eggs and beans in front of me. ‘But you know what they say – the devil looks after his own. Get that down you, you’ll soon be right.’

  He was correct about the restorative qualities of our breakfast, but I couldn’t help but wonder as I ate, why it was that his would go straight through him as if it never touched the sides, while mine would immediately convert into another layer of flab. When I thought about it, Gavin didn’t eat much that wasn’t just meat and didn’t drink much that wasn’t alcoholbased. Maybe he just was the Atkins Diet in action.

  ‘Fill your boots, mate,’ he encouraged me. ‘If I know Steve, we probably won’t be getting any more solids today.’