The Singer

by Cathi Unsworth

  ‘Oh yes, you know, I still live here, like. It’s just not often that I go away for so long these days. They’re quite crazy, those Japs, you know. Don’t seem to matter to them how long in the tooth or past your sell-by date you are. It’s still all punk rock to them. Somethin’ else, they are, really.’ He gave a little chuckle and I tried not to start grinding my teeth.

  ‘Are you still writing the book then?’ he finally enquired.

  ‘Yes, yes, I am. I’ve met Steve now, and Lynton. It’s going pretty well…’

  ‘Oh, that’s nice. How were they? Doing all right for themselves, still, are they?’

  ‘As far as I could see.’

  ‘Oh, that’s good. I don’t see much of them any more, as you know, but I still like to hear that they’re doing OK.’

  I had a sudden fear that I was actually caught up in the middle of one of Alan Bennett’s thought processes and I’d never come out again. Had Kevin only managed to find my phone number again when I was in the worst of all possible moods, just to taunt me with his fey Northern banalities? Was he doing this on purpose to punish me?

  ‘So, anyway, I’ve been giving it some thought, this interview you wanted to do…’

  ‘Oh, have you? Really?’ Subconsciously I put my hand on my hip and started nodding.

  ‘That’s right,’ he said and sighed. ‘Do you remember, I told you about Rachel?’

  I tried to. ‘Vince’s old girlfriend?’ I dredged up from memory.

  ‘That’s right. Well, I’ve talked it over with her and I’ve decided that I will do another interview with you.’

  ‘Well, that’s very good of you. And her. Thanks, thanks a lot.’ I really tried not to sound sarcastic but I think he caught a hint of it.

  ‘All right then,’ his voice gruffened a shade and speeded up. ‘Have you got any spare time then, this week? Only I could meet you Thursday, if that would suit. Same place as last time?’

  ‘Thursday…’ I pretended I was consulting some diary or other. In reality, all my pages were blank for the foreseeable. ‘Yeah, that would be fine, Kevin. What time shall we say?’

  ‘Let’s make it midday, shall we? Just come and ask the barman, like you did before. Oh and Eddie…’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Would you mind coming on your own again? Not with Gavin, like?’

  This was becoming a popular refrain. ‘Of course not, Kevin, I’ll be there at noon, this Thursday, upstairs at the Red Lion, was it?’

  ‘That’s right,’ he sounded doubtful again, even as he said it. ‘I’ll see you then. All right, Eddie. Ta ta.’

  ‘See you then, Kevin, bye.’ I put the phone down wondering how boring that was going to be. I was fairly sure that now I had Steve’s interview, I had the best of Blood Truth. I didn’t think Kevin was going to have much of worth to add to it.

  As I looked up again, my eyes lighted on a couple across the road, strolling along, hand in hand. He had dark hair, oiled back into a quiff and a Hawaiian shirt. She had a sleek black bob with a fringe cut over her eyebrows.

  They probably didn’t look anything like us really, but it seemed to me I was watching a timeslip of me and Louise coming up here for the first time, nearly eleven years ago. When we were young and in love.

  I stared at them until they had disappeared. The will to step outside in the sunshine and go looking for a drinking companion slowly drained out of my body. Instead, like an automaton, I went as far as the shop downstairs, bought a bottle of Jack and came back up to my festering pit alone. Drew the blinds, put Scarface on the DVD and let Al Pacino really articulate what was going on inside me.

  By the time Thursday had rolled around, the bright weather had rolled away, replaced by the usual grey skies and dirty, recidivist rain. Or maybe that was just the climate in Stoke Newington perpetually. Even the one bus that went up there didn’t seem to relish its task. You had to leave early if you needed to rely on the 73. It’s not that old cliché that you wait half an hour then three will come at once; more like you wait an hour and seven all pull up in a clanking crocodile, snarling up the traffic the length of Essex Road so that you feel you have reached purgatory on the top of a Routemaster.

  The Red Lion was its usual cheerful self too. The congregation was a bit thinner on the ground than on my last visit. Some old biker with a grey goatee steadily emptying his pockets into the fruit machine, a thickset, middle-aged bloke with a black mop top who looked like a lost Ramone leaning against the bar in tight black jeans and a sleeveless T-shirt that revealed far too much of a paunchy torso.

  The hideous cacophony of Guns ‘N’ Roses ‘Welcome to the Jungle’ blared from the jukebox. The air was stale and deathly, the sweetish stench of unclean carpet mixed with the spent smoke of a thousand dog ends, eau de rock’n’roll funeral parlour.

  Speaking of which, the goth barman was still there, trying to stay awake while listening to Stokey Ramone’s war stories, which were delivered in the monotone of the permanently pissed and drug damaged. I was surprised to see his eyes light up when he saw me, but I suppose even I was preferable to Our Great Night at The Marquee with Chelsea in 1979.

  ‘Hey, you was right, mate!’ he hailed me enthusiastically.

  Really, I thought, that would be the first time.

  ‘About Blood Truth. I got Kivin to burn me off a CD of their stuff. Who woulda thought it, eh? It’s fuckin’ choice!’

  This information didn’t go down too well with Stokey Ramone.

  ‘Blood Truth,’ he creased his formidable brow, ‘I remember them. Bunch of Northern arseholes.’

  ‘Nah,’ the barman shook his head. ‘They were genius. Do you want a pint, mate?’

  ‘Yeah, make it a Four X,’ I said.

  ‘Northern arseholes,’ repeated Stokey, staring into his pint.

  The barman waggled his pierced eyebrow at me to convey this was normal behaviour from the tosser and I rather enjoyed the fact that he now had something to wind him up about.

  ‘Nah, it’s on the house,’ he said when I reached for my wallet. ‘He’s upstairs waiting. You know the way.’

  Kevin was perched on the same barstool, with his mineral water and paper, exactly as I’d left him the time before.

  ‘Oh, hello, Eddie,’ he said as I came in.

  ‘Hi, Kevin, good to see you. I hear you have a new fan.’

  We shook hands and I sat down opposite him.

  ‘Oh, you mean Richard downstairs?’ Kevin smiled. ‘That’s right, I have. He’ll be the first one in the queue to buy your book, he will.’

  He waited until I had settled myself, my tape recorder and my pint down comfortably. Then his face became serious.

  ‘Now, Eddie, you know what I said to you last time, about how I feel about Vince? Right, well, what I’m about to tell you will probably explain. It’s not an easy thing to go through, d’you know what I mean? But as I’ve said, Rachel thought that you should know this, just in case you do manage to find him alive somewhere. Have you got any further with that, by the way?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘Good, well I hope you don’t,’ he said. ‘No offence, mind. Not to you, any road.’

  He picked up his glass of water and took a delicate sip.

  ‘Are you recording?’ he asked. ‘Right. Well, you wanted to know why Vince put me in hospital, didn’t you? It was because I knew his guilty secret. Steve and Lynton never did and they probably still don’t to this day. They had their own problems at the time, like enough.’

  He sighed. His eyes dropped to his paper beside him, and his left foot bounced unconsciously up and down. This was obviously pretty hard for him and I suddenly felt guilty for dismissing him as a boring inconsequential. Just like everyone else had always done.

  ‘It were New Year’s Eve, 1980, the last year we lived in that squat I was telling you about,’ he said, his eyes still fixed on the newsprint. ‘We was all invited to a party at Tony Stevens’s house – big, posh gaff he had, up in Little Venice.’


  For a minute I thought I was having a flashback all of my own. This was the same night Helen had been talking about.

  ‘I was running a bit late from the others ‘cos it’s me mam’s birthday, New Year’s Eve, and I’d got to go out to make a phone call to her. It sounds daft now, I know, but we were that skint that I’d been going through all my drawers, coats and trousers and all the nooks and crannies in me room to try and find enough two pence pieces to last a couple of minutes. You probably can’t imagine that, having grown up in a world of mobile phones. But in them days a phone were a luxury and we certainly didn’t have one in that house.

  ‘So, any road, because of all this, Steve and Lynton were ready to go long before I were. I was still upstairs in me underpants when they called us to go. So I just told them I’d catch them up; it worked out better for me that way, meant I could stop off at the phone box first on the way to the bus stop.

  ‘So they went off and I was just getting myself dressed. I knew Vince was still in the house, he’d been playing his bloody Elvis all time at top volume, I were getting right sick of hearing it. Then suddenly,’ he raised his eyes up to look at me again, ‘it gets switched off and I hear him clattering down the stairs.

  ‘Well, that’s them off then, I’m thinking. But then I hear something else. Vince shouting. I couldn’t make out what he were saying, he were too far away. But this shouting’s followed by a load of crashing about. I got a bit frightened then. Wondered if someone had broken in or summat. So there I was, trying to get my jeans on and my boots all laced up when I hear the front door slam and someone running away up road.

  ‘By now, I’m brickin’ it. I’m sure it’s burglars and that Vince has interrupted them and had some kind of fight. So I creep out onto landing as quietly as I can, trying not to stand on a creaky floorboard or owt, in case they’re still down there. But it’s all gone totally quiet. So now I’m thinking, what if them burglars have just got off up road and left Vince lying in a pool of blood? And I start walking downstairs, dreading what I’m gonna find down there.’

  Kevin dropped his eyes again and shook his head. Took his glasses off and rubbed the lenses with the tails of his shirt. His left foot was still bouncing, as if he was tapping out some soundtrack to the horror that was unfurling in his memory. I daren’t say a word in case he stopped.

  ‘At bottom of stairs,’ he said, putting his glasses back on, ‘to your right, there’s the kitchen. Well, the door’s open and the light’s on – but it opened outwards, d’you know what I mean, so I can’t see in there. So I just stand there for a minute, trying my best not to shit meself. I can feel hairs standing up on the back of my neck, just like they say you do.

  ‘Then I hear this like low, moaning sound and I’m thinking, oh Christ, they have, they’ve brained him. So then I goes running into kitchen. And there were someone lying in a heap on the floor all right. Only I can see right off it’s not Vince.’

  He raised his eyes and they were wells of pain. ‘It were Rachel. Poor, bloody Rachel.’

  ‘Shit,’ I said. ‘What happened?’

  ‘It were awful, Eddie. Just fucking awful.’ He shook his head, took his glasses off again and rubbed his eyes.

  ‘What had happened was that Vince was basically tired of Rachel. He’d been ignoring her for months and she were slowly turning into this zombie that we saw but never heard. She were pumped full of drugs by then, of course, which we’d all been trying not to notice. But she must have really wanted to go to that party, she’d got all dressed up and she’d been ironing his shirt for him in kitchen for hours, waiting for him to come and take her to the ball. Only he didn’t want to take her, did he? He wanted to sow his wild oats, like usual. So they’d had an argument in the kitchen. He’d lost his temper and…Well, I don’t exactly know what he’d done. What it looked like were he’d just picked up the whole bloody ironing board and thrown it at her. With bloody iron still sitting on the end of it, still plugged into wall. Then he’d just run off and left her there.

  ‘I think the board had probably hit her and knocked her out, you know, the metal edge on front of it or summat. Either that or she’d fallen when he’d thrown it and hit herself on sideboard. She’d fallen over any rate, and the ironing board was lying on floor beside her. But it were worse than that, Eddie. Much worse. Bloody iron had fallen on top of her. It had come off the side of her head. It were there, burning a hole in carpet. But it had already burned another hole. On the side of her face.’

  ‘Jesus!’ My mouth dropped open.

  ‘Yeah. I rang the hospital as quick as I could, like. But she started coming round before the ambulance got there, she was just whimpering with pain, her whole body was shaking like a leaf, I’ve never seen anything like it. And I didn’t really know what to do for the best, I honestly didn’t. I thought she were gonna die. All I could do was hold her hand and tell her help were on its way. But I just felt helpless, really helpless. And it seemed like they were never gonna get to us. It seemed to go on for ever, until the ambulance men came and properly sedated her. And, God, Eddie, the smell of it will never leave me. The smell of burning flesh.’

  ‘Shit,’ I said, trying to picture the scene. ‘What did you tell them when they got there? Didn’t they want to call the police?’

  Kevin’s eyes dropped back down to the floor. ‘I had to make up a lie, Eddie. I had to tell them I thought it were an accident.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘’Cos I were trying to protect her, of course,’ he shouted. ‘Sorry,’ he stopped himself short. ‘You don’t get it, do you? I couldn’t tell them anything else ‘cos I knew she’d been tekking heroin. And I knew there’d be some in the house. And the last thing that I wanted was for her to wake up, with half her face burned off, to find she were under arrest. Funnily enough,’ he shrugged, ‘the doctor told me later that it were probably a mercy she were so off her face. It had numbed her, apparently. Stopped her feeling the pain so much when she came around. Some mercy, eh?’

  ‘Oh God,’ I said. ‘I’m so sorry, Kevin. No wonder you didn’t want to go into it.’

  ‘No,’ he agreed. ‘But if you want to know the truth, that’s what Vince was capable of.’

  There was a pause while we both necked what was left of our drinks and I lit a cigarette.

  ‘So what happened next?’ I finally asked. ‘How come the others didn’t know anything about it?’

  ‘Well,’ said Kevin. ‘I spent the whole night up the hospital with her, St Mary’s in Paddington. Horrible place, that. When she finally came round and was allowed to speak to me, she begged me not to tell anyone.’

  ‘What? Why?’

  ‘I never did understand her reasoning. I think…I dunno. I think she were probably ashamed. Ashamed she’d let herself get into such a position. You know, Rachel came from a really good family. She were a really bright person. She were studying at St Martin’s while we were in that squat. That’s what her parents thought she were doing, mekking a career for herself in art world.’

  He gave a harsh, humourless laugh.

  ‘And they were about to come down and find out different. Imagine what they must have thought.’

  This time, the déjà vu was deafening. This was almost exactly what Helen had said about Sylvana. There was a pattern here. Rich, awkward, artistic women coming to a horrible end when they met Vince Smith. This book I was writing was changing every time I did a new interview. It was on a horrible downer, a dream mutating into violence and ruined lives. Was there ever a music biz story that didn’t end up this way?

  ‘And anyway,’ Kevin went on, ‘when I finally get back to the house, there’s a whole other world of drama going on. Some bloody Scotsman and a mad woman called Donna trying to kick bloody door in ‘cos Vince has copped off and disappeared with some bird called Sylvana. On the same bloody night he did that to Rachel.’

  ‘That’s unbelievable,’ I said.

  ‘Not if you don’t have a conscience.’

  There wa
s another, awkward silence.

  ‘Do you want another drink?’ I offered. I knew I bloody needed one.

  ‘Yeah. Thanks, Eddie. I’ll have another mineral water.’

  ‘You sure you don’t want anything stronger?’

  He looked at me like I was stupid.

  ‘Do you really wonder why I don’t?’

  This time it was me who had to look away. ‘No, I’m sorry, Kevin. No, I don’t.’

  I went back downstairs, my head in a spin.

  Stokey Ramone was asleep with his head on the bar. Kiwi Richard was polishing glasses, nodding his head along to ‘Sweet Home Alabama’.

  ‘Same again?’ he asked brightly when he saw me.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said, trying to raise a smile.

  He wouldn’t let me pay for this round either, so I promised him a free copy of the book when it ever came out. His response was enthusiastic enough to wake the sleeping Brudder.

  ‘Bastards,’ he said, and slid off his stool, staggering bandylegged towards the Gents.

  This time, when I came through the door and looked at Kevin sitting all on his own, staring sadly at his paper, I didn’t see him as the unregarded little drummer. Instead, I realised what he really was. The biggest man in Blood Truth.

  ‘So,’ I said tentatively. ‘I take it Vince didn’t realise the magnitude of what he did that night? Until you put him straight.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Kevin nodded. ‘Oh, I sat on it long enough, like. About two months I kept that information to myself, ‘cos that were what she wanted, like. But in the end…Everything unravelled so fast after that night. Everything just went wrong. I suppose I didn’t really tell you the truth last time, about that Sylvana. ‘Cos I did hate her too. I hated her as much as Steve did, but for completely different reasons. I hated her ‘cos that bastard just swanned off with her, after he did that to Rachel, just swanned off without a care in the world. I doubt he would have even come back if we didn’t have that tour booked in the States. And that were nightmare enough, I tell you. For a start, he brought her with him. I had to sit there on that bus, night after night, while they were simpering over each other in the corner, thinking about that hole in Rachel’s face. Sit there while Lynton turned into a junkie and Steve turned into an alcoholic. While we got bottled off by rednecks and had the KKK threaten to kill us in Alabama. But it was him I hated most. And I let that hatred grow inside me, until finally we were alone.