Beneath the Blonde (3 page)

“Chatty.”

“Yeah, well it’s my fucking kitchen, man, and they’re always bloody here.”

“Is Mariella …?”

“I dunno. Not yet anyway. Oh fuck it, why me?”

“Why you what?”

“Why do all my fucking girlfriends become lesbians?”

Greg laughed, “Only one of your girlfriends has become gay, and you knew Hannah was more or less a dyke when you started going out with her.”

“So why’d she go out with me then?”

“Last fling? Sad and desperate? Just to persuade herself of what she wouldn’t be missing?”

“Bitch.”

“Nah. Just confused. It’s the
zeitgeist.”

“The what?”

Greg picked up the bongos and started drumming while Alex rolled another joint. He explained, “Sign of the times. It’s trendy for girls. The girls we know anyway. Look at Mariella, I mean she’s probably more or less straight.”

“Oh, she’s more, believe me.”

“Ok, but if most of her women friends are gay, and it’s not as if she really knows that many other people in London anyway, she’s bound to get a bit curious. And you know … they’re women. They’re girls. They’re nicer, softer, cleaner—all that shit. I’d be a lesbian if I was a girl.”

Alex snarled, “Not if the lesbians you knew were those lesbians.”

“Yeah, well, maybe I could do without the barbed-wire tattoo on the face …”

“And the fucking dogs everywhere.”

Greg drummed faster, Alex holding the joint for him so he didn’t have to move his hands from the rhythm. “That’s not the point. These specific lesbians aren’t the point. I know some lesbians who don’t have tattoos or dogs.”

“You do?”

“Yeah. There’s a girl in my photography class. And she doesn’t live in Brixton either.”

“Well, she must have got lost.”

Greg stopped drumming. “You’re deliberately being a wanker now. My point is that when you say all dykes are ugly or nasty or whatever …”

“I didn’t.”

“No, but you implied it. And that’s just the same as when they say all men are crap or all men are slobs—which, come to think of it, is probably true …”

“Fuck off, you might be, but I did my washing this morning. And I’ll be ironing tonight.”

“Or all men are liars …”

“Or all men are rapists?”

“Maybe that’s stretching the analogy a little too far, but you know what I mean. You know, all Irish are thick?”

Alex stood up and started pacing the small roof area, looking down at the square he’d lived in for the past four years, once a haven for squatters of all kinds, now slowly reverting to “society” as the housing associations and coops bought up the properties and normalized them. He sat on the edge of the roof and looked back at Greg. “Yeah, all right. Of course I know what you mean. And I also know that this is my house. I found it. I opened it, I got the electricity and water put on, I cleared the garden, I fixed the roof, I put in the windows and when Mariella brings that bloody Autumn round here …”

“Autumn?”

“Yeah. Her girlfriend’s called Evechild.”

“Oh.”

“See? Anyway, the problem is, I don’t exactly end up feeling that this Englishman’s home is his castle.”

“Fair point. Even for an Irishman. Pub?”

“In a minute. I just want to finish this.” Alex looked around for his notepad, Greg pointed it out under the several empty cans of beer.

“I did it for you. Edited the poem. It’s finished.”

“You bastard. That’s private.”

“People who get stoned as much as you do should never attempt to keep things private, they fall asleep too fucking much. It’s good though.”

“Thanks, you’d know.”

“But I’ve made it better.”

Alex grabbed the notepad and stared at it for a couple of minutes, frowning hard. “Fuck me, but you have. Hah!” He tossed the notepad down and opened the last can of very warm beer.

The young men shared the last beer and watched the sun set on the other side of the river and talked of Greg’s photography course and the relative merits of Split Enz and Crowded House, football and rugby, until Mariella joined them with three glasses, two bottles of Spanish wine and two mammoth portions of chips swimming in salty vinegar. When she went inside to get her after-sun cream for Alex, having kissed him for a full five and half minutes, Greg looked across at his friend and smiled. “Yeah, she certainly looks like a dyke to me.”

Alex threw a handful of cold chips at him. “Fuck off. Let’s start a band.”

Alex always maintained that he’d been thinking about suggesting a band to Greg for months, but it was Greg’s editing of his poem that decided him. Greg believed Alex was too unnerved by the honesty of their earlier conversation about sex and sexuality and wanted to get back to any safe topic. Football, music, anything as long as it didn’t involve sexual truth. Whatever the reason, Greg agreed and the idea became real. Alex brought in his old friend Dan as keyboards player and singer, gleefully pointing out that Dan was gay and wasn’t it strange that Greg didn’t seem to have any gay men friends, and Mariella pointed them in the direction
of Steve, bass player, sometime playwright and Autumn’s brother. The band rehearsed on the roof for the rest of the summer and moved down to Alex’s bedroom when the days turned colder. For a while, Mariella sang with them but when she left in October, with Autumn and the two puppies, Alex wrote their first real song “Welcome Winter” and Greg brought in his new flatmate, Siobhan, to sing. Greg and Siobhan weren’t yet lovers. That grew over the following months, but by late November of 1988, the line up of Beneath The Blonde was firmly established.

Since 1988, Siobhan Forrester had created one hell of a reputation for herself. When the band was performing she strode the stage like a manic sex goddess. Alternating between her whispered intros and proclaiming the songs with cut-glass attitude, she held court between chord changes—rude, crude, loud and powerful. The music press, at a loss to describe her adequately, took the easy route, comparing her to other women performers. Gig reviews were crammed with quotes like “A cross between Sinead O’Connor and Jenny Eclair with the voice of Annie Lennox”. And always, no matter how erudite the publication, the reviewer would find some way of getting in a description of the physical Siobhan—long lean limbs, impressive height, amazing mouth, tits that shouldn’t be allowed near hips so sheer and, inevitably, all that hair. The celebrated blonde locks. Blonde that changed from week to week, gig to gig—elemental silver and platinum, alchemical peroxide, edible strawberry and honey, and occasionally just pure out-and-out white. Whatever they thought of the music, and most were agreed the band was close as fuck to perfect, every reviewer, male or female, gay, straight or raving queer was in agreement on one thing—Siobhan Forrester’s looks were phenomenal.

So, turning up at the Chalk Farm address on Sunday afternoon, Saz had expected a collection of security guards and
a video entryphone at the very least. What she didn’t expect was to stroll up the overgrown path, climb the three steps to the purple front door of the baby pink house, ring the bell and, after a fish eye had glared at her through the peep hole, to be greeted by Siobhan herself. At least she thought it was Siobhan. The mouth looked like it belonged on Siobhan Forrester, but very little else did. Saz was just starting to wonder if every beautiful woman had a dowdy little sister hidden away somewhere when the tall, thin woman with short brown hair held out her hand. “Saz Martin? Thanks for coming so quickly. I’m Siobhan. Come in.”

Saz followed her into an open entrance hall, decorated in a mini rain forest of tropical houseplants and pots of yellow and orange flowers against a backdrop of draped purple muslins.

The newest icon of female pop sexuality shuffled away on holey socks and called over her hunched shoulders, “I’ve just put the kettle on, would you like some tea?”

“Yeah, thanks.”

In the first floor kitchen Saz sat on an extremely modern and very uncomfortable stool, four inches too tall for her legs to reach the floor. She watched while the darling girl of Britpop poured boiling water on round Tetley teabags in chipped yellow china mugs and then fished out the soggy bags with a bone caviar spoon. She knew it was a caviar spoon because Siobhan told her so. “It’s since we’ve had some money. Greg’s got this thing about caviar. I don’t get it myself. The only time I like seafood is when it’s a tiny piece of anchovy with a thin crust pizza base on one side and a lot of melted mozzarella on the other.”

Saz could see that the woman before her was the Siobhan Forrester she thought she knew, but only just. She had the distinct feeling she was looking at the “before” photo from a trashy magazine makeover. This woman was tall enough, but hardly the giant she seemed on stage, closer to Molly’s
height, maybe five foot nine or ten. Saz knew most of the hair must be a wig though she wasn’t prepared for the ordinariness of the mousey brown bob. But what really got her was the body. It just didn’t seem to be there. She looked up from Siobhan’s T-shirt covered chest to see the younger woman smiling at her.

“I know. It’s a shock. Or so the men tell me. And of course I don’t answer the door like this to the press—our manager would never allow it. It is me though. It’s easy. Really. Same old girl shit just taken to extremes.”

“Girl shit?”

“Yeah, you know. Hair, height and hips. Hair’s obvious—just wigs. Height’s shoes. And hips—well, there’s never really any hips anyway. I’m lucky I suppose. Prancing around the stage for two hours a night does wonders for the bottom line—that’s why I like doing the big dates last, so I’m even thinner than usual by the time we get to them. Makes the waist go in and so the hips go out—with the right clothes they do, anyway. The rest of it’s just makeup.”

Saz nodded. “All of it?”

Siobhan grabbed a breast in each hand, pulling the T-shirt material tight across her front. “Almost. These bits are all mine—with a little help from Mr Gossard of course.”

Saz had the grace to blush. “Yeah. Right. I’m sorry. It’s none of my business. I just …”

“Expected Bette Lynch?”

“Maybe. Or Bette Midler.”

Siobhan laughed and put a cup down in front of Saz. “Christ, even drag queens get to take their heels off at home!”

Twenty minutes later Saz was listening to Siobhan’s stories of Beneath The Blonde—the early years. She’d just heard a catalogue of particularly disastrous motorway journeys and
hideous B&B’s when Greg Marsden walked into the kitchen. He appeared not to have seen Saz as he grabbed Siobhan by the throat, turned her to face him with a growl and then pulled her off her chair. Saz was about to stand up to protest, but stopped in her tracks as Siobhan burst out laughing and then swung both of her legs around Greg’s waist, attaching herself to his body with her own and her face to his mouth with her big famous lips. What seemed like an embarrassed eternity later to Saz, Greg put Siobhan down, ruffled her flat bob and, putting the kettle on for the third time that afternoon, said, “Hi honey, I’m home. Going to introduce me to your new friend?”

He flicked the switch on the wall and held out a hand for Saz to shake, adding, “New Zealand, not Australian, so don’t even ask.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it.”

Siobhan threw a cushion at Greg, narrowly missing the top of his almost six-foot frame. “Don’t mind Greg, he has a massive antipodean chip on his shoulder.”

“I do not,” he countered, returning the cushion with rather more accuracy. “I have a massive Aotearoan chip on my shoulder—and I’m not a bloody Australian.”

“That’s nice, darling, but I don’t think our guest cares much. Saz Martin, this is Greg Marsden. My lover of ten years, the writing force behind the band, though don’t tell Alex I said that, and a New Zealander who has lived in England for … ooh, I don’t know … six weeks from your accent isn’t it, hon?”

“Sixteen years. Almost half my life. But don’t let that stop you getting it wrong in your article, Saz—who do you write for?”

By the time she left for home, Greg knew that Saz was about as interested in writing music articles as she was in having
her tongue pierced and Saz had two new jobs. One as assistant to their PA and the other, rather more importantly, as unofficial investigator/bodyguard for Siobhan Forrester.

“No, fine, darling. You go on tour, all that extra work, all those late nights, wonderful idea, it’ll do you the world of good.”

“I hate it when you use that tone, Moll.”

“I hate it when you do stupid things, Saz. Doesn’t stop you doing them though, does it? And really, it’s not as if we need the money.”

Saz ran her fist up and down her left thigh, a new gesture of irritation she’d developed in the past eighteen months—although her hands had healed fastest, they’d also been covered in burn gloves for long enough for her to learn to do without her fingernails. She got up from the old wooden farmhouse table and took their dishes to the sink.

“Jesus, Moll, this is the first real job I’ve been offered in ages. I’d have thought you’d be pleased.”

“Right. Sure. Of course I should be pleased. A pop band wants you to go on tour with them for months, just at the point where you’re almost healthy …”

“They’re hardly a ‘pop’ band and I am healthy.”

“I’m the doctor. ‘Almost healthy’ and just when I could actually start having you to myself again.”

“You’ve had me all to yourself for the past eighteen months!”

“Except for all the other people I’ve shared you with—the physiotherapists, occupational therapists …”

“Psychotherapists. Don’t forget them.”

“Yeah, well they obviously didn’t bloody well work. Not
to mention your mother, your sister, her husband, her kids and every ex-lover you’ve ever had.”

Saz ran water over the plates, keeping her voice low and trying not to get caught up in Molly’s rising anger. “A slight exaggeration, babe, it was only Carrie really, I don’t see any other ex-lovers. And being with her has usually been more work than socializing.”

“Well, Carrie doesn’t seem to be able to tell the difference between work and fun and she takes up enough space and energy to feel like half a dozen old friends.”