Like getting a room in the Hilton. The lies tripped off her tongue like honey as soon as the snooty concierge gave her a doubtful look and asked in a patronising tone: ‘Isn’t this an odd time to be checking in to a hotel room, madam?’
He probably did have a point. There was a party going on in full swing around them, lines of the aged well-to-do finally letting their hair down and doing the conga round the hallowed Hilton halls.
‘My husband and I just got back from New York. Our flight was delayed and our luggage is following us on, so we’ve had more than enough hassle for one evening,’ she told him, laying her accent on thick and deliberately emulating Glo’s haughty demeanour. ‘We were told that you had the most accommodating service in London. But if that’s not the case, then we can certainly take our business elsewhere.’
She had put her chequebook down on the desk where he could check out the fact it was with Coutts, the bank whose cheques were instantly honoured, the bank the Royal Family did their business with.
‘Safer than the Bank of England, my gel,’ as her grandma had told her.
The clerk looked her up and down and started to blush. She guessed that a woman dressed as she was, in a velvet imitation Paul Poirot cape and a bouffant of bright red hair, should not have been the sort of woman he’d expected to have an account at the Queen’s bank.
‘Certainly we can accommodate you, madam,’ he said. ‘I was merely pointing out that this is an unusual hour and an unusual day. Now, let me see…’ As he consulted his bookings, Sylvana cast a backwards glance at Vince, who was trying to hide behind a potted palm in the middle of the foyer until the reservation had been made. Neither of them had been sure if his thick-soled Robot creepers and black drape suit and pink shirt with bootlace tie were strictly what constituted the correct dress code.
Now he was surrounded by partying pensioners with party hats at skewed angles on their heads, blowing party trumpets in his face. One old dear even tried to goose him as she danced drunkenly past. He regarded them with an expression of total disbelief.
‘Ah, here we are, madam.’ The concierge was all politeness now. They had a room, on the 25th floor, so they could see out across the whole of London. Sylvana decided to take it for a week. Even if Vince wasn’t staying, she needed to be somewhere safe; somewhere Robin would never think to look. Twenty-five storeys up over Park Lane ought to do the trick.
She tried not to laugh the whole way up the elevator with the stony-faced bellboy who obviously did not think them appropriately dressed. She delighted in palming him a quid from her purse with a sarcastic smile and watching him go red as he pocketed it.
Then finally, with the whole of Hyde Park spread out before them, illuminated by strings of fairy lights glimmering for as far as the eye could see, they were alone.
‘Well,’ said Vince. ‘Now that we’re here, what were we running from?’
‘Everything,’ Sylvana said. ‘My whole life. It’s all been one great big goddamn mess and now I’ve got to straighten it out. Thank you for getting me out of that place. You don’t know how much you’ve done.’
‘You’re a mystery, aren’t you?’ Vince raised his fingers and softly ran them down the side of her face. He stared deep into her eyes as if trying to divine her thoughts. ‘Here was I thinking you were some massively successful singer, happily married…’
She shuddered as he said those words and cut his sentence off.
‘No, I’m not married, thank God. I was never quite as stupid as everyone thought. I was never a total pushover.’ Her words sounded harsh to her ears and she stopped, wondering what he was thinking. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said quietly, ‘you probably think I’m crazy, don’t you? Running off from that party and bringing you here when I’ve only just met you.’
‘No, I don’t think you’re crazy at all,’ he shook his head. ‘I’ve been in this business long enough. I’ve found out for myself what you think it’s gonna be is not how it turns out. And as you could probably tell, I didn’t particularly relish seeing in the New Year with all those creatures either.’
Confidence revived, Sylvana looked up at him with a smile.
‘Well, let’s order some champagne from room service and celebrate the fact that we didn’t.’
They lay side by side on the huge double bed, suspended above the glittering city, drinking the ice-cold champagne and telling each other all about their lives. Occasionally their fingers entwined, or he wound a strand of her hair around his finger. But Vince was supremely delicate with her, as if he were afraid he might break her if he came on too strong.
She told him about her childhood in the gilded prison in New Jersey and was surprised to hear that his own background had similar echoes. For a start, they were both beneficiaries of the rag trade. Vince said he came from Wensleydale, a huntin’, shootin’ and fishin’ part of North Yorkshire and had grown up in a mansion built by his textile-magnate grandfather. A big, rambling stone house up on the moors that was never properly heated and always overflowing with dogs, children and a succession of exasperated nannies. It sounded a lot happier than the childhood she had known, but Vince said that the good times had come to an abrupt halt when he was sent off to public school at the age of nine.
‘Bloody sadistic places they are,’ he told her. ‘You had to spend your whole time fending off advances on your arse. I’m not joking. And I was a little wimp when I first went there, a right little crybaby who got beaten soundly every night before bedtime and blubbed for his mummy on his pillow. Luckily I had a growth spurt when I was thirteen and grew about a foot overnight. Once my weight had caught up with that, people gave me less of a hard time.’
School holidays compounded his isolation from his brothers and sisters. While they were off riding to hounds, he’d be up in his room, reading Beatnik literature and listening to the radio, getting more and more introverted and suspicious that he must have been a changeling baby. He’d been hooked on Elvis since he was a little boy and liked to imagine he would grow up to be a singer like The King – until he heard The Sex Pistols. That was when he’d decided to go to art college, to try and meet some people to form a band with. He’d always been good at art, as well as music and English so he got into his nearest college easily. His dad hit the roof. Like Glo and Ruben, Smith senior already had a career mapped out for Vince, and when his son rebelled, he disowned him.
‘No son of mine behaves like a bloody puff.’ Vince imitated his father’s final speech to him. ‘Mixing with limp-wristed, Marxist degenerates at a bloody art college when you’ve a good, solid future ahead of you. You go there and you’ll never come back. You’ll not be any son of mine any more.’
Like Sylvana, Vince hadn’t been back home for a very long time.
He told her how he met Steve and Lynton at a Sex Pistols gig in Doncaster, how Steve had tried to hide him in the van on the way home but he had woken up and thought he was having a vision of Elvis which was really a pendant hanging over the rearview mirror.
Sylvana laughed and said she had met her own band at a Damned gig about a year later. Then she started telling him what had happened with Robin. ‘I thought he was so amazing to begin with,’ she sighed. ‘You see…’
She paused, wondering whether it was wise to continue. But they had shared so much already, and after all, tonight had been all about throwing caution to the winds. ‘I don’t know if you can understand this,’ she said. ‘But when I hear certain words and all music, I can actually see colours.’
She stared hard at Vince.
‘Wow,’ he said, looking genuinely interested. ‘What do you mean? A wash of colour over everything, or like coloured shapes dancing around in the air?’
‘It depends what the sound is. If it’s harsh, like the music in that house tonight was, it’s like big blocks of colour in abstract shapes, really bright and quite brutal. But the music we made was more like swirls and patterns, like a whirlpool of the colours of sky at twilight. The most beautiful colours, I think.
That was why the band was called Mood Violet. That was the colour I mainly saw when Robin and Allie first played me their tapes.’
Vince’s own twilight eyes were round with amazement. ‘Wow,’ he said again. ‘How amazing to see the world through your eyes. God, I wish I could do that.’
‘It’s not always amazing. Sometimes it’s hideous. My mother thought I was crazy, that I was making it up to get attention, so she sent me to all these shrinks to try and straighten me out. I hate to say this, but Robin was the first person who seemed to understand what I was saying. He told me he could see colours too, and his music proved that to me. It was so easy to write lyrics and sing to it, it just seemed to flow out of me. But I was so wrong about him. Like everything else,’ she dropped her eyes to study the bubbles in her champagne glass, ‘that was just one of his lies. He delighted in telling me so, the last time he was angry.’
‘Oh, little Sylvana,’ Vince put his own glass down, took hers and put it on the bedside table. Then he wrapped her in his arms, dropped delicate kisses on her forehead, her eyelids, her face.
‘Do you want to see what else he did to me?’ she finally had the courage to say. ‘Do you want to see how fucked up my life has become and why I need to get away from it?’
‘Only if you want to show me,’ whispered Vince.
She rolled out of his arms, sat on the side of the bed for a moment, gazing out at the sparkling, revelling city below. If Vincent Smith was all that he seemed to be, then he would have to pass this test.
She stood up and unbuttoned her dress, her back still to him. Stepped out of it and draped it across a chair. Then she turned to face him, still wearing her bra and knickers. With those still on, he could see it well enough, and if he was going to turn and run in disgust at the sight of it, she didn’t want to be left here naked and alone.
She watched the horror bloom on his face as he took in the rings around the top of her breasts, a bouquet of burns made by cigarette ends. At the purple arcs carved above the line of her knickers, abstracts made with broken glass that curved down still further where he couldn’t yet see.
‘Oh, my God,’ he finally said, sitting up and swinging his legs over the side of the bed, looking up at her face at last. ‘My poor darling. He did that to you? That ugly bastard did that to you?’
Sylvana nodded.
‘Come here to me,’ Vince stood up and strode towards her, picked her up like a child in his arms and carried her back to the bed.
‘No one’s ever going to hurt you again, I promise.’ He stared deep into her eyes. ‘I’m not going to let them. Christ, no wonder you needed to get away.’
His fingers traced around the patterns of her scars, and as he dropped his eyes she saw a single teardrop on his thick black lashes.
‘Does it still hurt?’ he asked.
‘Not physically. And the rest of it, I try to blank from my mind.’
‘Jesus. If I ever see him again, he’s a dead man.’
‘I’m never going to see him again. I don’t know how yet, but I’m getting as far away from him as possible,’ Sylvana said. ‘Whatever it takes.’
Sylvana suddenly felt completely wiped out. The fact that Vince hadn’t rejected her, the fact that she felt safe in his arms, meant that her struggle was over. Now the events of the night were catching up in a sudden, soporific wave.
‘Gosh,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry, I feel really sleepy all of a sudden.’
‘I’m not surprised,’ said Vince. ‘When you go through something traumatic and come out the other side, that’s the natural reaction. Your body shuts down to let you repair yourself. You go ahead and sleep; I’ll be guarding you. No ginger Jock wanker’s coming anywhere near you ever again.’
‘Vincent Smith,’ she said, her eyelids heavy, her vision swimming in a purple haze. ‘You really are an angel.’
When she woke up, he was still staring at her, with an expression of such love and tenderness she wondered if she was still dreaming. The events of the previous night fast-forwarded through her mind.
‘God, it’s really true,’ she said. ‘I am here with you.’
Vince stroked her hair. ‘Sylvana, I’ve been thinking. All night I’ve been thinking,’ he said, and his voice was gruff with the lack of sleep. ‘I’ve never met anyone like you before. You’re pure genius.’
‘No, I’m not,’ she said quickly. ‘I’m an idiot. I—’
‘Shhhhh,’ Vince put a finger up to her lips. ‘Yes, you are, Sylvana. Now I’ve met you, I don’t ever want to be apart from you.’
She didn’t say any more. She just started to kiss him and he kissed her back and it was what it should be like; no timidity, no revulsion, no suppression, just love, deep love, like she’d never known before, like part of her had known all along this would happen and now she’d finally found him.
Hours later, exhausted and giddy, collapsed on their backs with their fingers entwined, Vince said. ‘Can I finish my sentence now?’
She laughed. ‘What sentence.’
‘Well,’ Vince rolled over onto his front, took hold of both of her hands and looked her straight in the eye. ‘As I was saying, before you so rudely interrupted me with all these terrible physical demands, I was thinking all night long about what to do about this situation we find ourselves in. Deciding that having met you, my life would be wholly incomplete if I wasn’t sharing the rest of it with you. Wondering whether you would do me the honour of being my wife?’
She laughed, for a moment still thinking he was mocking her.
‘I’m serious,’ he said. ‘I’ve never been more serious about anything in my life. Marry me, Sylvana, and I’ll take you away from this dreadful place and all the rest of the shit that’s been following you around. I’d never joke about something like this.’
‘But what…What about the rest of your life?’
‘The rest of my life can sort itself out. I just want to be with you.’
‘You’re really not joking, are you?’
‘Woman,’ he said, thickly putting on his Yorkshire accent, ‘will you marry us or what?’
She started laughing again, delighted. ‘Yeah, all right then. Yes, yes I will.’ And she carried on laughing.
25
Crush the Petals on the Floor
May 2002
I couldn’t decide what to do about Donna. For the rest of the Bank Holiday weekend I tried to weigh up Allie’s warning about her innate personality defects against what there possibly could be to gain from meeting her. All the time, the unwelcome spectre of Robin Leith kept popping back into my mind, rasping his dire warnings against waking the dead. It all went round and round in my head while I tried to keep myself gainfully employed transcribing the tapes and avoiding Mother’s calls.
I was overdue for a visit and I normally caved in to pressure around Bank Holidays, but I still hadn’t found the courage to tell her that me and Louise were kaput. I knew what would happen if I did. She would wonder how on earth I was going to manage to keep the flat on with my sporadic earnings. She would muse that I might be better off giving it up; start spinning the web to try and snare me in my own shortcomings and drag me back to Guildford. To assuage my sorrows with burned oven pizzas and gravy that you could cut with a knife.
I couldn’t be doing with that. Of all the things I was afraid of, that was by far the worst. I wished I could have sloped off with Christophe for a few days of alcoholic rumination, but he had gone to some rock’n’roll weekender with his new bird, in bloody Great Yarmouth of all places, so he was no good to me. I pictured him wearing a Kiss Me Quick hat in force nine gales and pissing rain, wandering up and down a tatty seafront full of SAGA holidaymakers and one-eyed yokel children. That kind of made me feel better. But not for very long. I was starting to get cabin fever and I couldn’t concentrate on work, couldn’t settle in front of the TV, couldn’t find any solace in any kind of music at all.
In the end, I thought, fuck it. It was seven o’clock, Sunday night and everyo
ne else was lapping up the rays and enjoying the long weekend in the company of a significant other. I couldn’t stay put in my stuffy mausoleum with dead singers and fucked up rock’n’roll casualties from another era for company. I may as well go out for a wander, drop into the few pubs worth going to, see if anyone I knew was about and up for a few beers. You know, try and at least act as if I had a life.
Just as I had decided this, the phone rang. ‘Oh, piss off, Mother,’ I said aloud, but something kept me lingering by the doorway while the answerphone clicked on. I suppose, in my most futile fantasies, I was hoping it might still be Louise, admitting she’d made a mistake and wanting to come home. Seeing Helen and Allie’s cosy set-up had upset me more than I wanted to acknowledge.
But the voice that came out of the machine was a most unexpected one. ‘Hello, Eddie, it’s Kevin Holme here. I’m sorry it’s been such a long time. I said a couple of days, didn’t I? And that was a couple of months ago. Anyway, I—’
I ran back over to the phone and swooped it up. ‘Kevin,’ I said. For a moment there was just the squeal of the answerphone protesting as I clicked if off and I had a hideous feeling I had just gone and cut the connection.
But then I heard: ‘Eddie?’ His little voice sounded dubious.
‘Kevin, hi,’ I said, trying to sound as cheerful as possible. ‘How are you?’
‘Oh, I’m fine. I didn’t know if you were still going to be there. I lost your number for a while and I only just found it. Would you believe, it was still in the pocket of the jacket I was wearing that day I met you. Like I say, I’m sorry it’s taken so long, but things have been a bit hectic since I saw you, d’you know what I mean? I got asked to go on a tour of Japan and there was a few other things I had to see to that took me longer than I thought…’
He carried on in this slow, plodding manner for another few minutes, while I started to wonder if it would all come to any point soon.
‘No need to apologise,’ I tried to chivvy him along. ‘Are you back for a while then, now?’
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