Dead Girl Walking (20 page)

Mairi underlined just how pleasingly wrong he had been.

‘I’ve not seen many Cold War movies,’ she observed, ‘but I’m guessing their version of Alexanderplatz tends not to feature a host of Japanese teenagers spilling out of KFC toting Captain America plushies they’ve just bought at the Galeria Kaufhof.’

Parlabane strained to look through the crowd, past them, over them, scanning the faces streaming through the concourse and trying to picture what his contact would look like.

It seemed imperative to see her coming, to avert the vulnerability he felt in standing there waiting for a stranger to identify herself. He had nothing to go on, however: only the hope that he’d see someone who was visibly on the lookout as she approached. They’d only spoken for a few seconds and there was little he could gauge from a voice, especially with a foreign accent. She had sounded quite husky too, so she could be forty years old or she could be twenty-two with a forty-a-day habit.

He had his phone out and switched to camera, swiping the screen every so often to prevent it going to sleep. He knew he ought to alter the setting, but it only occurred to him to do so at times like these, when he had to have it ready to shoot and therefore couldn’t go dicking around in the sub-menus.

‘Do you photograph everybody you meet?’ Mairi asked.

‘If possible, yes.’

‘Why?’

‘Because although I’ve got a good memory for faces, flash memory is even better. More effective than any amount of adjectives too, if I’m trying to describe a person to somebody else.’

‘Don’t people object?’

‘Not if they don’t know I’m snapping them.’

‘I’m guessing that’s going to be tricky in this case, seeing as we don’t have a clue who we’re looking for.’

Parlabane fixed upon a tram that was slowing down, watching it deposit a dozen or so people about thirty yards from the World Clock. Then, when it moved off again, he suddenly spotted a face he recognised.

‘Fuck me.’

‘What?’

Parlabane didn’t answer as he didn’t want Mairi staring conspicuously at his subject. He raised the camera and focused, holding it so that it obscured his own face.

When the tram cleared his view his attention had been drawn to two men moving more purposefully than the rest of the crowd, striding towards the tramlines from the north side of the concourse. They were both white, both mid-forties, one close-cropped and jowly, the other tall and gaunt.

‘Jack, what?’ Mairi asked again.

‘Look to your left,’ he said, so she would look the wrong way and stop conspicuously searching the crowd for whoever he was aiming his phone at.

He was too late, though. The close-cropped one returned his gaze just as he snapped the pair of them in burst mode, taking six images with one shot.

Parlabane watched him become suddenly animated. He didn’t stop, didn’t point, but spoke urgently to his companion, then they both veered off hurriedly in different directions, neither making for the World Clock any longer.

‘Oh shit.’

Mairi turned back to face him.

‘Jack, would you tell me what the hell is it?’

‘We need to go.’

‘Why? What about our contact?’

‘I think he just left. I must confess I often have that effect on people, but they’ve usually at least spoken to me first.’

‘He? I thought you spoke to a woman.’

‘I did, but I think she was just taking a message for her boss. Come on.’

Parlabane began walking, leading her towards the U-Bahn station.

‘Who did you see?’

‘It’s not so much who I saw as where I’ve seen him before. There were two guys heading straight for us, and one of them was on the CalMac ferry to Islay two days ago.’

I phoned our manager, Mairi, when I went back to the hotel before the soundcheck. I wanted someone further up the chain to know about the incident backstage, and to find out what was with the merch girls.

I got fobbed off, even getting a dressing down: her way of warning me what was worth wasting her time with in future.

‘It’s not my concern what consenting adults get up to, Monica, no matter how distasteful either of us might happen to find it. You’re not in the orchestra any more: you’re going to see a lot worse than that if you’re planning a career in this business. There’s a reason they talk about sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll.’

She made me feel like a daft wee girl, and maybe she was right. I hadn’t told Heike I was going to phone Mairi because I hadn’t wanted her to know I was calling for help, so I guess deep down I knew I was being a bit pathetic. Heike’s mind was soon on other things anyway.

I saw her doppelgänger in the crowd that night. Okay, truth is, I couldn’t help looking for her: always a mistake. During a show you just see darkness out in the auditorium, catching the occasional glimpse of an individual as the lights sweep across the stage. If you start searching for a face in the crowd, eventually you start imagining it on every head that bobs in and out of view. Making it harder, more than one girl down the front was rocking the Heike signature cream-blonde look.

I thought I spotted her about a dozen times, then there she was for definite, stage left, having made her way to the front. She was singing along, almost in a trance. She knew every word. I suppose that wasn’t a surprise.

More of a surprise was the fact that she showed up in Bilbao the next night. I wasn’t looking for her then; in fact, by that point I had pretty much put her from my mind. It was Heike who drew her to my attention, giving me a weird grin halfway through ‘It Meant Nothing’ and indicating with a nod. There she was again, almost in the same spot as she’d found the night before, stage left, in a different city, four hundred miles away.

Heike seemed amused, maybe even flattered. She was used to this, I guess, but I was less sure about where the line was drawn between fandom and stalking. I thought it was just creepy: what kind of sad-act moulds her whole existence around an obsession with one person?

Heike had a word with Angus as she was changing guitars, and I saw him scuttle across the stage in front of our backline, leaning down to hand the girl something. To my annoyance I realised it was a backstage pass.

I couldn’t understand why Heike wanted to do this, but on our way to the dressing room she said that what would only cost a little of her time, this girl might remember for ever. ‘And if she’s an obsessed nutter, it might help to see I’m as full of shit as anybody else.’

Whatever, I thought it was unnecessarily generous on Heike’s part.

Looking back, I can see why some people say no good deed ever goes unpunished.

Right after a show Heike could be many different people, and it was difficult to predict which one you were going to get. As I knew, having all of that adulation, energy and passion flow into you for ninety minutes can have a dizzying effect. It was the feeling that Damien said made it all worthwhile, but we were only picking up sparks around the edges. Heike was the one earthing the whole supply.

The night Maxi turned up and served his writ it was that amazing high that contributed to her landing with such a crash.

She could be bubbly, chattily cheerful, like she would burst if she didn’t share the goodwill that was gushing through her. She could be controlling and precious, the fawning of the audience tapping into her inner two-year-old. She could be clingy, needing the physical touch of her bandmates to maintain the closeness she’d had on stage, and she could be solitary, totally unapproachable, reliving every note in her head in a quiet corner with a beer or a shot of Islay malt.

That night she must have felt she had something to give, though maybe she knew there was something she could take too. She sat with the girl, whose name was Hannah, in a corner booth of the bodega we had gone to after the show. It was just around the corner from the hotel, spotted earlier by Scott who’d said it was late-opening and in staggering distance of our rooms. Heike sat basking in the glow of Hannah’s worship, Hannah enjoying the fact of Heike’s very being there.

She looked more comfortable than when I’d seen her in that café in Barcelona, but there was still something nervous about her. She kept tugging on the sleeves of her Heike-copy white jacket. I wondered if she self-harmed.

There were plenty of nights when Heike liked to hold court during the comedown from her performance, but here I saw her listen as much as talk, really intent upon what the girl was saying. What the hell could she be seeing in this person? I wondered.

Heike was good at faking it, though: when she wanted to, she could make your every word seem fascinating to her, so I knew this might be a performance for Hannah. I offered Heike an out: leaning into the booth I said I was heading back to the hotel and mentioned being back on the road in the morning. It was a cue to allow her to say she had better call it a night as well, but she didn’t take it.

If anything, I was the one she seemed impatient to be rid of.

The next morning on the tour bus, Heike was ashen-faced, hiding behind sunglasses and getting into a seat with her headphones on to signal Do Not Disturb. As I was becoming quite the connoisseur of hangovers – other people’s as well as my own – I recognised this as more than the consequences of overindulgence and not enough sleep. She looked wounded. Actually, she looked exactly like I would have done the morning after Brixton if our kiss had not been abandoned so quickly.

I sat tapping my journal into my laptop in my usual disjointed way, in between bouts of staring out of the window at a landscape that was becoming more familiar but no less exotic.

About two hours into the trip Heike sat herself down opposite and took off her shades.

‘Do you mind?’ she asked. ‘I need to talk.’ Her initial courtesy was made moot by the insistence. It was strangely unnecessary, though, and I got the impression she felt she had some making-up to do. I couldn’t work out why, but I was eager to find out.

Her eyes were heavy. She looked like she hadn’t slept, and might have been crying.

‘What’s the script?’

‘I think I’ve screwed up,’ she said, before proceeding to fill me in on what had been a very late night with Hannah.

‘I’ve spoken to plenty of hardcore fans and sympathetic critics over the years, but I’ve never encountered anyone who so
got
what I’m all about. I mean someone who truly connected with my music, and not just in a passive way.’

I admit I felt surprise and disappointment as I listened to this. Get over yourself, Monica, I thought. Heike was sharing something with me
now
.

‘It was both humbling and, I don’t know,
inspiring
to learn that my music has genuinely helped somebody: helped her understand herself, and deal with some of the things she’s gone through. She said it felt at times like I had written these songs specifically for her to relate to, but it turns out that’s because we have a lot in common.’

She glanced out of the bus window, biting her lower lip.

‘Like what?’ I said, intrigued more by what she might be about to admit about herself than what she had learned about Hannah.

‘She lost her mother at a very early age too. She was two and a half. She has almost no memory of her, just fragments, impressions, and can’t separate her own memories from the few bits and pieces told to her by people who actually knew her mother.’

‘So I guess “Kaleidoscope” is on her playlist a lot,’ I said, letting her know I had also understood the song. ‘“A Square of Captured Light” too.’

‘Yeah. She said she even
has
actual
Polaroids. Plural, so she’s doing better than me on that score.’

‘You only have one? I thought that song…’

Heike smiled sadly.

‘One Polaroid photo. That’s the only image I have of my mum.’

‘Can I see it?’ I asked.

‘It’s in my flat back in Glasgow. I never take it anywhere in case I lose it. I’ve got a photo of a photo, though.’

She pulled out her phone and tapped at the screen, then handed it to me, resting it on her palm like it was priceless. Having seen her toss the handset around at other times, I understood the near-ritual of this, and all that it meant.

I really felt for her as soon as I saw the picture, and a song I had played night after night took on so much more meaning. God, her mother looked so young, much younger than Heike was now. She couldn’t have been more than twenty, if that; elfin-featured and delicate. I couldn’t see a striking resemblance, but that was partly because of what truly moved me: there was so little detail for Heike to treasure. It wasn’t a close-up head-and-shoulders shot. Her mother was standing several yards from the camera, next to a Litfass column, her hands pointing to one of the posters on it. I wondered if the poster had something to do with Heike’s father, but there was no way of reading it. Her face must have been smaller than the end of my thumb, even on the original, and this was all she had.

‘She’s so young,’ was all I could think to say.

Heike nodded, not wanting to go there.

‘I did a lot better than Hannah in other ways. At least I had my dad: she never knew hers. She grew up in care homes and other institutions. I think there was abuse, but she didn’t go into detail. She said that when she discovered my songs it meant everything not to feel so alone any more. I only wrote them to make sense of my own feelings, so it’s amazing to discover how much they’ve meant to someone else.’

‘I guess when you’re writing something you never know who it’s going to touch, or how deeply.’

‘It wasn’t just the stuff about our mothers. Normally I’d have been quite spooked by something like that, and I’d definitely be a bit wary of some stranger baring her soul and maybe thinking I had this vast significance in her life. It wasn’t like that, though. I felt so comfortable in her company, so quickly at ease. What she said was so insightful: it was like we’d known each other for years. I don’t think I’d ever felt anything like it.’

I felt another sharp pang of envy, but it was cut short by the very fact that we were having this conversation. Whatever else had gone on between them, their meeting hadn’t ended well.