Beneath the Blonde (2 page)

Molly started to kiss Saz, slowly drawing her back from sleep. Her hand followed the map lines of burn scars back to breasts and stomach. Saz roused herself enough to hold Molly’s hand fast and draw it to her face. She kissed the hand and then turned away, her back to Molly, whispering, “I’m sorry, I can’t babe, I’m all raw.”

Molly cradled her lover and listened to their twin-rhythmed breathing as Saz fell asleep beside her. After nearly eighteen months of patience, Molly was starting to wonder when the rawness would end and Saz would finally be cooked enough to eat again.

Six hours after they’d fallen asleep together Saz came in from her usual run across the Heath, headed straight for the shower and stood for a good ten minutes under the fast running cold water. The shower sluiced away the sweat and aches in her muscles and the chill raised her heartbeat another notch or two. Her body cold and dripping, she climbed back into bed beside Molly.

“Hold me?”

Molly turned over, still dreaming and took Saz in her
arms, acknowledging the cold wet skin with a grunt and a lick like a kiss to the forehead and then they slid together back into sleep.

An hour later they were wakened by sun twisting in around the wooden slatted blinds and Molly groaned as a bright beam hit her, a shot in the right eye.

“Saz, I hate this. I told you these blinds weren’t dark enough. We should have kept the curtains.”

Saz shuffled closer and laughed as Molly pulled a pillow over her face, barely stifling her own complaint, “And I despise your early morning cheeriness.”

Saz hushed Molly’s objections with a long soft kiss, nibbling at her lower lip and then smoothed her girlfriend’s sleep ruffled hair.

“My darling Moll, it’s a beautiful crisp day, the Heath is covered in trees doing their red and gold thing, I have no work and you have a day off. Let us greet the sunshine and play in the world with joy and gratitude that we are happy, healthy, alive and, best of all, together.”

“God, I hate it when you wake up all Pollyanna.”

“Even when Pollyanna’s feeling sexy?”

“Hayley Mills feels sexy?”

“I do.”

Molly opened her eyes wide. Saz laughed, “You’re so predictable Molly Steel!”

“Yeah, and you so rarely feel sexy these days, let’s get on with it!”

Molly pulled off her own T-shirt and rolled over on to Saz’s naked body, nibbling at her shoulders, arms, breasts. She closed her eyes and ran her fingers lightly over the four heavy ridges of scarring that counted her down from just below Saz’s breasts to her groin, her hand hovered, dived and then stroked up, over the more heavily burnt right thigh then over the lightly scarred left. Saz’s legs and stomach were once again strongly muscled, and Molly could feel the
long thigh muscles tense under her touch. Her exploration of Saz’s torso nearly over, Molly bent her head to kiss the breasts that had, to her unspoken relief, escaped permanent injury. Her mouth to Saz’s nipple, her hand reaching for her groin, Molly was lost in the pleasure and enjoyment of her lover. It took two or three rings and Saz’s decidedly unsexual stirring underneath her before she heard the phone. Molly barely paused, just moving her mouth from the skin long enough to say, “Leave it, I like this.”

Saz shook her head and pulled herself up on the bed, away from Molly’s kiss, “I can’t, babe, it might be my sister.”

“She’ll leave a message.”

“No she won’t. Not if she’s pissed off with me. Please?”

Molly threw back the bedclothes and stormed into the lounge, picking up the phone just as the answer machine cut in. Saz heard her irritated greeting and then a few short sentences were exchanged and the receiver was replaced with an echoing click from the phone in the kitchen. Molly walked back into the bedroom, a piece of paper in her hand.

Saz looked up sheepishly, “Not Cassie? I’m sorry. I’ll call her later.” Saz was looking at Molly’s confused grin as she held out the piece of paper.

“What? Why the look? Who was it?”

“Siobhan Forrester would like you to call her—when you have a moment. If you’re not too busy.”

“Who?”

“Siobhan Forrester. The singer, I suppose. Wonder what she wants with you?”

“The
Siobhan Forrester?”

“Well, yeah. She had a Scouse-ish accent and she said this was her private number and would I please be very careful about who I gave it to. I suppose she thought I was your secretary which is why she talked to me like an idiot.”

“I’d better call her.”

Saz started to get out of bed and Molly lunged at
her, pulling her back. “Oh no you don’t. We were busy, remember? And anyway, like the good secretary I am, I told her you wouldn’t be back for another hour. So you can just lie back and think of me for a change.”

“Is that the same as lying back and thinking of England?”

“Only if an Asian Scot counts as English. Now, Ms Martin, what do we think about sexual activity in the workplace? Or is having an affair with your bimbo secretary just too much of a cliché to contemplate?”

Saz didn’t bother to answer and Molly regained her rightful position at Saz’s breast while Saz did her best to ignore thoughts of why the lead singer of Beneath The Blonde should be calling her at eleven o’clock on a Sunday morning. A few moments later Molly was nearing her target and Saz had no trouble forgetting Siobhan Forrester. She sailed with Molly’s experienced hands and mouth into a body and mind mix where her burn scars were as irrelevant as the tiny tattoo on Molly’s left thigh. And twice as sexy.

At barely twenty-three, Siobhan Forrester didn’t really appreciate what the man from NME meant when he had called the promising newcomer: “the dream reincarnation—Deborah Harry face with Patty Smith vocals and lungs like Janis Joplin never left town”.

Five years later, after she’d invested in the works of her musical godmothers to wile away months of negotiating the Ml at five in the morning, she knew when she was being praised by a master, even if only as a newcomer. She also knew that their second album would confirm the band’s status and keep them forever out of the flash in the pan bracket. Getting ready to gear herself up for the next press launch, she reminded herself that as long as she kept her lips apart just a little for the photo calls and wore a short enough skirt, all the baby boy journos (and at least a third of the girls) would fall over themselves, and each other, to be nice to her, taking great care with their sharp muso prose to note her looks first and her music second. It was tedious and predictable and if it annoyed Siobhan, it probably annoyed the boys in the band even more, but all five of them knew that the perfect packaging they’d chanced on by accident—blonde girl singer, four boys backing—was the glitter that sold their music. While the press was slowly starting to acknowledge that the music could stand by itself, no one yet felt brave enough to test the waters and allow Siobhan more than a moment or two out of the spotlight. So the four men of the band prepared for the press part of
the launch by buying matching charcoal grey Paul Smith suits, with a different coloured linen shirt for each and Siobhan prepared herself by buying most of South Molton Street with half of Top Shop thrown in for glitter trash value. Their manager, their tour promoter, the record company and the band itself knew that Beneath The Blonde was made up of five people, only one of whom happened to be Siobhan. The buying public knew that too, but only as much as it knew winter follows summer and first love always dies. Truth, but not the kind of truth you think about too much. For the world outside the band, Beneath The Blonde was the Blonde.

In the past five years Siobhan and the guys had learnt more about the business than they’d ever hoped to know. They’d had a fairly slow start. The first single, a minor triumph, had been followed by another year of student gigs and record company stonewalling. Then they’d eventually managed to record a very well received first album with a willing if disorganized indie label. That album had been a huge and very surprising success. However, the subsequent tour had been followed not by the weeks of glory they’d expected but by another agonizing year in which they eventually sorted out all the business details. And rather messily extricated themselves from a tricky relationship with the guy who had been acting as their manager until a real one happened along. An old friend of the bass player Steve, Alan had known far more about managing stand-up comedians than bands and had only been looking after them as a favour. Manager-free (after a great deal of negotiating and a greater deal of cash), they accepted an offer from Cal Harding, a Texan businessman their record company had introduced them to. He’d commuted between LA and New York for thirty years and, in his early fifties, he knew the business
inside out. Or certainly seemed to. With one success under their belt and badly needing to realize the promise of so much more, the band couldn’t afford not to make a leap of faith on the manager front. They signed away the next five years to him and then, for the first time in their career as musicians, they were able to leave business to someone else and get on with being creative. Greg and drummer Alex churned out over forty songs, Siobhan and Dan edited, pruned, arranged and then rearranged. After five major arguments between Alex and Dan, yet another monumental fight between Siobhan and Greg, and a single moment in which even Steve was ruffled, they finally had the sixteen tracks they felt ready to let Cal offer their record company. The album was whittled down to thirteen songs, at least one of which everyone hated, and another which needed virtual blackmail to get the record company to agree to. (Cal had proved himself a man of great artistic integrity by simply sending a fax to the most difficult company executive: “No ‘Pink Pleasure Please?’ No Blondes.”) Luckily for all of them, his bravura show of force was successful.

And now, with the second album due out soon, Cal had set them up with a new tour manager, dates were being booked and time on the road was coming up in the new year. Only three months to start with, but that was three months too long for Alex and Steve who both hated to go away—and nine months too short for Dan who, having just broken up with his boyfriend, would have been happy to go on the road forever and never come back. Siobhan knew that they stood a chance of becoming something with this album, of building on their first success and actually making all the work really matter, not just the years she’d been with the band but everything else too: the hundreds of nights in grotty clubs and pubs since she was sixteen, the effort she’d put into trying to make homes out of sad bedsits and worse
shared squats with Greg. She knew that Beneath The Blonde On Tour had to be something incredible.

She also knew that the silent phone calls she was receiving at three in the morning were starting to annoy her. The nasty anonymous letters weren’t very pleasant and when the first bunch of yellow roses arrived, she realized she was frightened and maybe it wasn’t just a joke after all.

The band had been Alex’s idea. Stoned again in the muggy summer of 1988, sitting on the roof of his squat in Vauxhall, gas tanks and the Oval hazy in the near distance, he was burning his back and rewriting his fourth poem of the day. Stuck on line three, he was relieved to hear Greg shout up from the street. He stood on the warm pavement with a twelve pack of beers and the bongos he’d borrowed for a party the night before. Alex threw the keys from the roof and watched after them as they floated down to the street on their pink silk handkerchief parachute. Five minutes later Greg dropped a cold beer two inches in front of his new friend’s face. “I bought them this morning and left a couple out so they’d warm up for your crap taste buds.”

“Very considerate. Unusual for a colonial. Smoke?”

To Greg’s nodded agreement, Alex rolled his fourth joint of the day—it was one-thirty in the afternoon, he’d been up since ten and he was cutting down.

The two young men smoked and drank through the heat of the afternoon, enjoying the solid wall of breeze-free London heat and the freedom of summer. Greg was an engineer for a recording company and loathed every minute of his weekday job. He’d taken the job hoping it would help him with his own music, but found that the best of his work involved recording cheap radio ads with bad voice-over actors, while in the worst moments he was just a glorified (and slightly better paid) runner. Alex was signing on every second Tuesday morning and putting in twelve-hour days at
a pine furniture factory in West London for twenty quid a day cash in hand. He’d just arrived back from two weeks with his family in Cork and was gearing himself up to the regime of fortnightly lying to the government and daily lies to the tube inspectors and then wasting himself at the weekend as a relief from hating his weekdays.

As they sat and smoked and drank, Alex occasionally made forays all the way down to the cellar kitchen to bring up another slice of bread and jam for himself or bread and Vegemite for Greg, who complained that the Vegemite in Alex’s kitchen was Australian, not New Zealand, and therefore not the real thing. And then ate it anyway. After two warmish beers and a half-hearted attempt at conversation about cricket, Greg, who had cleared his own flat of party goers at six that morning, fell asleep and Alex finished his poem. Then Alex fell asleep, Greg woke up, rolled another joint, read Alex’s poem, edited Alex’s poem and wandered downstairs to chat in the kitchen to Alex’s Spanish girlfriend. Mariella had spent the day at Kennington Lido and after too long asleep by the reflected water, was applying after-sun to the backs of her arms and legs. He stayed long enough to make coffee until three of her dyke friends arrived with two dogs and a puppy on a string and he felt the warmth of Mariella’s welcome quickly turn to a more politically correct animosity. Waking Alex with the coffee, Greg told him that Mariella was back.

“Are those ‘wimmin’ with her?”

“Yep.”

Alex grabbed his coffee and growled. “Fuck it.”

Greg shook his head, “Nah, they’re all right. They’re just not very …”

“Nice?”