Gimme More (23 page)

‘Who gave you this number?' I ask.

‘It's on file,' says perky Imo. ‘I just wanted to ask you some background questions – like, how you met Jack, what he was like …'

‘That must be on file too,' I say. ‘Look, I'm sorry, I'm not going to talk about this.'

‘If I've called at an inconvenient moment, can I leave you my number?'

‘No,' I say, and I hang up.

‘What?' Robin asks. ‘What's the matter?'

‘While we're all here,' I say, ‘can I ask you a favour? If
anyone
from the media calls please would you say I'm not here and you don't know where to find me.'

‘How do they get this number?' Robin's looking anxious, as she does so often these days.

‘I don't know. And that's another thing. Please, if anyone asks
you about anything to do with Jack or me, blow them off. I know you're already aware of this sort of thing, Grace, but Alec mightn't have come across it before.'

Grace blushes and Alec says, ‘I don't understand. What's going on?'

Robin says tartly, ‘They use anyone they can get their hands on to insinuate themselves into Lin's confidence.'

‘But why now?'

‘Oh, there's always some excuse – some anniversary or other.'

‘But why don't you want to talk about it?' Alec asks. ‘Wouldn't it keep Jack's …'

Grace interrupts, ‘Lin finds it all too painful.'

‘I'm sorry,' says Alec, looking as if this has never occurred to him before. ‘But, if you talked to someone sympathetic, a friend, say, wouldn't it get the rest of them off your back?'

‘No,' Robin says. ‘It works the other way round. Talk to one and the rest think it's open season.'

‘Say one word,' I put in, ‘and it can come back to haunt you for the rest of your life.'

‘Can't you put the record straight?'

‘No. It's all like that question, “When did you stop beating your wife?” They start with a false assumption and you spend so much time and energy proving it false that everyone who doesn't say, “You protest too much,” says, “There's no smoke without fire.” Rumours and allegations stick, Alec. I'm sure you know that. You mess around on the Net. How much of what you've seen there would you say was true?'

Grace is blushing furiously now, but Alec says calmly, ‘Not much, but I'm sure if people knew the truth they'd stop inventing the rubbish.'

‘I don't think so. Which is the more interesting, Alec, Jack and Birdie met at a North London pub, or Jack met Birdie at a Tunisian brothel?'

Alec pauses for a moment and then says, ‘Assuming it was neither of those, where did you and Jack actually meet?' Oh dear. The slick little prick is catching on.

I treat him to my saddest, most open smile and say, ‘Yes, that's
exactly my point. The truth, whether it's mundane or exotic, is the only thing I've got left that hasn't been thumbed through and fucked over by strangers. See, when you're associated with the entertainment business everyone thinks that your whole life is there to entertain them. That's what you are – a living breathing soap – and they have the right to include themselves in your life. You aren't real. You're just something to watch on telly. Every little thing is up for grabs: what
actually
happened, Birdie? What did it
feel
like? There's always someone who thinks they have the right to know the deepest, most sensitive details. Why? Because you're entertainment and entertainment is for everyone. It's like you made a contract to share every last thing with anyone who wants it. But you didn't.'

If you prevent yourself from blinking long enough, your eyes will start to sting and a tear will form. If you're lucky it will swell and roll gently over your lower eyelid and down your cheek.

Robin says, ‘It's all right, darling. Here, let me fill your glass. You'll feel better in a minute.'

‘Sorry,' mumbles Alec looking mortified. Even Grace is staring accusingly at him.

I've shared my deepest feelings with him. Yes I have. But I haven't told him where I met Jack.

Meeting someone new is the best, the wildest time. The air crackles and hums with promise and I can be reborn. I can reinvent myself to become the perfect lover again. I'm a stranger in a foreign country – learning the language, discovering unfamiliar pleasures. I'm newborn every time. Breathless, restless, greedy.

Dumping an old love is like dumping an old identity. It isn't only the old love you're tired of: it's also the old you – what you became after close proximity to the old love. I slough off my old skin and stretch out in a warm new one which is so thin and sensitive it tingles at the lightest touch.

I was with an American called Cy Fuentes. He came over to record because London was the place to be at the time. He was handsome, talented and jealous. We lived in a converted studio on Sydney Street. I was manifestly so uninterested in the domestic bit
and he was so allergic to Bohemian squalor that he asked his sister, Gabriella, to come and keep house. Gabriella was responsible for my meeting Jack.

She was thrilled to be in London, thrilled to be on the music scene. English musicians were so cool. English boys were peachy and Gabriella couldn't wait to gobble one up. She came across Jack while trawling the King's Road one evening.

Normally, her taste was for clean-cut kids in mod uniform so she was afraid Jack would be as rude as he was scruffy. On top of that, she couldn't trust her own taste in music. Cy was always making fun of her bubblegum boys. So she took me along for a second opinion.

‘Whaddya think, Birdie?' she said. ‘I mean, if he got his hair styled and wore a suit?'

‘No,' I said.

‘But he could be gorgeous.'

‘Shhh!' I hissed. The hair on the back of my head seemed to shiver. Goose-bumps came up on my arms. Because sometimes you hear a voice which you
know
can never be imitated or stolen. And then there's the rarest of all rarities – the unique voice with something to say. The real thing.

‘He's got the cutest eyes,' Gabriella jabbered. ‘Is he any good, do you think? He sounds kinda rough to me. I guess if he was any good he wouldn't be playing in a dim little club like this.'

She wouldn't shut up so I left her there and went home. I'd have to check him out when I was alone.

But the very next night Cy was playing at the Round House and at the end Gabriella brought Jack backstage to meet him. She wasn't showing him off so much as establishing her own credentials. She was saying, ‘Look at me – my brother's famous, he gets the prestigious gigs – I'm someone to know. If you're nice to me maybe I'll do you a bit of good, introduce you to the big league.'

Now Cy was one of those hypochondriac musicians who go on endlessly about their health. His speciality was muscular aches and pains.

When Jack came in, Cy was surrounded by admirers and I was giving him a very public massage. Because that was another thing
about Cy: he wanted to appear like a boxer after a fight, with a towel around his shoulders and his trainer – or in this case his handmaiden – in attendance.

Cy was saying, ‘For fuck's sake, girl – it's where the Infraspinatus and the Teres major tuck under the deltoid – don't you know anything?'

Performers can be a real pain in the arse. But there were at least three hopefuls in the admiring crowd who would have cheerfully flattened me to get their hands on Cy's muscles.

I was in any case beginning to think Cy was too old for me. Too set in his ways. Too addicted to over-the-counter medicines. It was all becoming stifling and predictable. The world seemed full of older men who got their kicks from training young girls to be their own personal handmaidens.

That was the scene Gabriella dragged Jack into. She was saying, ‘Hey, Jack, meet my brother, Cy.'

And Cy was coming over all anatomical about a kink in his shoulder. And the admirers were trying to show everyone their tits.

I wiped my hands on a towel and said, ‘I was never any good at geography. Find your own Teres major.'

One of the admirers said, ‘Let
me – I
studied shiatsu in Wales.'

‘Go right ahead,' I told her. ‘I was taught never to shiatsu on my own doorstep.'

No one laughed except Jack. I looked up and saw him sniggering behind Gabriella.

He said, ‘Hi. Didn't I see you in the club a couple of nights ago? You walked out on me.'

Gabriella didn't even bother to give me a name. She said, ‘This is my brother's girlfriend.'

‘Not any more,' I snapped. ‘Sorry Jack, I'm walking out on you again.' And I grabbed my jacket and marched towards the door.

‘Honey!' Cy protested, ‘come back. You know I think you've got great hands.'

But I kept on walking until I hit the street where an undignified little scene developed. Cy was half naked, trying to mollify me. Gabriella was saying snotty stuff like, ‘This isn't the time for one of your sulks.' The admirer was saying to Cy, ‘Take my coat – you'll
catch your death.' About a dozen fans were clamouring for Cy's autograph. And Jack was laughing his head off.

Eventually one of the admirer's admirers passed a big fat joint around and things calmed down enough for all of us to climb into cars and go to a party in Hampstead.

But the damage was done. Golden, laughing Jack made Cy look like a crotchety old man. The air hummed when I looked at him, and the walls shook when he looked at me. He danced with me once that night, slipping his arm round my waist and pulling me on to his lean hard body as if he was trying me on for size. The heat was almost unbearable and I had to push him away before we melted and became glued together, belly to belly, thigh to thigh.

He said, ‘You're not going home with him tonight.'

I said nothing, but I knew it was simply a statement of fact.

‘Because', he said, ‘that would be a shame and a crime, and a horrible waste.'

So that's how Jack stole me from under Cy's nose. And that's how I stole Jack from under Gabriella's nose – depending on who's telling what to whom.

The Tunisian brothel story is much better because it's a direct steal from a tale about Messalina and it contains all the elements of hubris and come-uppance you could possibly want.

They say I took a bet with a famous whore as to which of us could service the more johns. Points were awarded for artistic merit and degree of difficulty. They say I was winning by a country mile when Jack turned up with his guitar. Then two things happened: I captivated him with my venerean artistry and he captivated me with his music. I pulled out of the contest and he paid my debt of dishonour to the famous whore.

They say this was where I caught the syphilis with which I infected Jack, driving him mad and causing his death and my own downfall at a single swipe. Yep, that's how the story goes. Whores and heroes, venality and venery, pride and fall. Great ingredients, and if they're still telling it about Messalina two thousand years later, what chance have
I
got?

At the time, running away with Jack was seen as a bad career move. He wasn't rich and famous, like Cy. He didn't have the
trappings.
People suddenly talked about me as if I were a groupie and as if there were a recognised career structure for groupies. How unbelievably stupid.

Of course, what emerged, what neither Jack nor I recognised in his tiny shared flat with mattresses on the floor was that, as soon as Jack got me, he acquired the trappings. We became the subject of in-house, music-biz gossip. He became something other than just another young rocker. We were polluted from the very beginning, so to speak.

But I was only eighteen and Jack was only twenty-three. Babies. We didn't give a toss. When you don't know if you'll even last a single night together, when you don't know if you'll be having lunch with the one you went to bed with, how can you be accused of career moves? I could have blagged my way back into Cy's favour if I'd been interested in
trappings.
I'd done it before and I've done it since. Having my cake and eating it too was my speciality.

The miracle to me was that, at twenty-three, Jack was the youngest man I'd been with. His skin was as tight and supple as mine. He was someone I could
play
with. We could roll around like puppies. We could invent and shout nonsense at each other. We could dress up in freaky costume and hit the streets. We could tell secrets and giggle at grown-ups. We never did anything the same way twice.

Unlike all the others, Jack didn't have a ready-made world he wanted to slot me into. He didn't have a rigid attitude to music and life any more than I did. We could make it up as we went along.

I was astonished. I hadn't realised that even after leaving home and being kicked out of school I'd been hogtied. I'd been moulded and shaped to fit into the adult world. Even the so-called anarchists of rock'n'roll had some sort of master plan I was being groomed for.

Jack, at the beginning, was a
true
anarchist. If he didn't like something he changed it. If he didn't like what was expected of him he didn't do it. On-stage, he didn't play the entertainer. He sang what he wanted to sing in no particular order. He talked to the audience, fought with them sometimes. He quarrelled with the band. He changed songs in mid-flight leaving everyone else
in disarray and scrambling to catch up. He wasn't afraid to fuck up.

It was undisciplined. It was irresponsible. It was irresistible.

Oh, and oh he smelled so sweet. He didn't smell like an adult. Even when his hair was unwashed, you could bury your face in it and swear he was a cat asleep in new grass. I didn't want a shower after I'd been with Jack – I liked the smell of his skin on mine. It was the smell of innocence. Beginnings are beautiful.