Heartbreaker (18 page)

A little later Johnny got an acoustic guitar and he and Colin took turns each to play while Paul drummed on the table. When people started drifting off to bed in the early hours, Alex decided to take a stroll around the gardens. As she walked toward the hedge that acted as a boundary to the kitchen garden, something caught her attention. Unable to identify the sound, half expecting to see the fox cubs and their mother, she crept forward and was surprised to see Christabel and Colin in deep shadow and hidden from view of the house. They were kissing and Alex reckoned if she’d been five minutes later, she would have caught them doing a whole lot more. She turned around and stole away as quietly as she had come, not sure what to make of it.

Chapter 43

The following week, Alex and Johnny were discussing how things had been when the British press broke the story about Heartbreaker’s hedonism and excess in ’79. She had heard Colin’s take on it, but was keen to hear what Johnny had to say.

‘It was rough, really rough,’ he told her. ‘Nicci went ape. We’d been married for about two and a half years, we didn’t have Christabel for another couple of years, that’s how much it shook our marriage. We’d been trying for a kid before that tour. We hung on, though. I wanted to make it work. I loved her, you know?’ He grimaced. ‘For a while, anyway. Andy’s kids, the twins, were about five when it happened. Tiffany took it really badly. Paul and Siobhan hadn’t long been married, but he came out of it least scathed, and, well, you’ve seen them. They’re rock solid, built to last. Tom and Colin weren’t married. They had fallout from family, but they coped.’ He looked down at the table. ‘My dad was disgusted. Said it told him everything he needed to know about people like me. “People like you are a disgrace to their family and country. You make me ashamed.” That was what he said. “You make me ashamed.” God knows, he hadn’t been impressed before that, but after … Jeez.

‘The irony was that the crew was far worse than we could ever be. They were wild, unbelievably wild. Some of the things they got up to …’ He paused. ‘Do you know, no one ever asked us if it was true? They all just assumed that as it was in the papers, it must be. My dad didn’t speak to me again until after Christabel was born.’

Alex took his hand, squeezed it gently. ‘How much of it was true?’

He stood up, started to pace. ‘That was the tricky bit, there was a grain of truth in most of the allegations. More than a grain in some. Yes, we drank ridiculous amounts of alcohol, that was no secret. Yes, we all used drugs, and Tom and Andy took it to extremes. Colin too, at times. People who knew us knew these things, although they didn’t know the extent of our addictions, I’m sure. We didn’t fully admit that even to ourselves.’

‘What about the other stuff?’

Johnny sat back down and ran his hands through his hair. He looked haunted. ‘Alex, you need to understand that when we were away, out of the country, we all did things that we wouldn’t have done here.’ He looked at her to see how she responded to his words. ‘We had women chasing us morning, noon and night. We didn’t go looking for anything; we didn’t need to. A couple of idiots even wanted to get us hard and take plaster casts of our dicks, for Christ’s sake.’ He threw his hands up in exasperation, then his eyes softened and he looked sad. ‘It was a circus. A zoo. It wasn’t real. Sure, we all got laid whenever we wanted. How could we fail to? And no, it didn’t mean we didn’t love our wives. I know it sounds like a cliché, but it didn’t feel like being unfaithful. Unfaithful would have been meeting someone, starting a relationship and falling in love. Or having a kid. This was just something we did to get through a tour, like getting pissed and stoned, especially to get through the middle bit, when the initial enthusiasm had waned and the end seemed a long way off.’

He paused, gathering his thoughts. ‘Performing was never a problem, we loved playing live. It was the best high there was. It was the other stuff that was a drag. We were still getting death threats, we all got homesick, we were fed up having nothing to do until the show, we got bored. We filled our time in with drugs, alcohol, girls and shopping.’ He smiled, grim and defiant. ‘It doesn’t paint a very pretty picture, does it? As to all the accusations about using people — women, mainly, they said we used — well it’s not that straightforward, is it?’

‘What do you mean?’

Johnny’s eyes were hard, his face set. ‘Well, I reckon we were used as much as anyone. Do you think any of those chicks would have wanted to know us if we hadn’t been in a big band like Heartbreaker? Do you think they moped around after we left until the next time we hit town? No fucking way. Half of them didn’t even like the music, and that’s assuming they had heard it in the first place. They didn’t care how well we did what we did, they just cared that we were famous.’ He sounded bitter. ‘They wanted a piece of us because of what we were, not who we were. Nobody ever chased after Johnny Burns from York. They chased Johnny Burns from Heartbreaker. And after they’d fucked us and we moved on, they hung out with the next big band to arrive in town. If they needed to, they’d screw the promoter to make sure they got backstage. They’d screw the roadies, the lighting crew, the sound guys, whoever it took to get them to the band. They even did hotel staff to get let onto our floor. One of them told me he’d had more blow jobs since he started as a porter than he’d had in his whole life before that. He was in his thirties. He’d only worked there about six months. The object of the exercise was to screw Heartbreaker, or whichever band it happened to be. The whole thing fed on itself. If we were users, then we were also used.’

Chapter 44

1979

Heartbreaker were touring in the States, following the release of their fifth album,
Icarus
. Johnny couldn’t remember exactly where they’d been; the band toured so much that things started to blur. He was being stalked by an annoying Australian journalist, but he and Tom had managed to give her the slip and had spent the afternoon shopping in an attempt to stay fairly straight prior to the show. They’d ended up in a couple of bars en route, but Johnny had stuck to beer. He felt like shit anyway, after what he’d done to himself following the previous night’s show. As they went into the hotel, a group of girls sitting in the lobby buzzed into action. Sure enough, as they approached a couple of teenagers detached themselves from the main group and intercepted them.

‘Hi,’ chirped the blonde one. Her brunette friend giggled. ‘I’m Jasmine and this is my friend Simone.’

‘Hi,’ said Tom, brightly. ‘I’m Tom and this is my friend Johnny.’

‘We know, we met you last year when you were here.’

‘Yeah? I thought you looked familiar.’ Tom was sleazy-smooth as he slid an arm around each girl’s shoulders. ‘So, how are you girls?’

‘Good, we’re good. We just wanted to see you guys again, you know?’

‘Yeah, I know.’ Tom pressed the button for the lift. ‘You coming up?’

The four of them piled into the lift when it came. Tom caught Johnny’s eye over the heads of the girls. He mouthed, ‘Eeny, meeny, miny, mo,’and raised an eyebrow. Johnny shrugged. They were pretty much all the same, when all was said and done. As they got out of the lift the girls hung back; they seemed to be bickering.

‘What is it, ladies?’ asked Tom.

‘We’re just having a chat,’ said Jasmine, who seemed to be the spokesperson.

‘Yeah? What about?’

‘Who goes with who,’ she said. ‘You see, I think we should swap after last year, but Simone isn’t sure.’

Tom’s dazzling smile made a brief appearance. ‘Well, hurry up and choose, time’s a-passing.’ Jasmine pushed Simone towards Tom and took hold of Johnny’s arm; decision made. Somewhere in the back of Johnny’s mind his conscience stirred, but he was so used to ignoring it that he just led Jasmine down the corridor to his room. ‘You got gear?’ called Tom as he opened the door. Johnny nodded. ‘Good man, me too.’ Johnny hadn’t doubted it.

Afterwards he tried to have a conversation with Jasmine. ‘So, what sort of music are you into?’ he asked her, stroking a stray strand of blonde hair from her face.

‘Oh, all sorts. I’ve met quite a few bands.’ She considered for a moment. ‘I think my favourite of your songs is
Ready to Rock
.’ Which wasn’t a Heartbreaker song. Johnny let it go. He didn’t know if she’d just got mixed up over the music or if she thought she’d just been screwed by somebody else. ‘At my birthday party, I’m hoping to get a couple of local bands to play as well as having a DJ. I just love music.’

‘When’s your birthday?’

‘Next month. I’ll be seventeen. It’s a shame you won’t be in town.’

Johnny was lost in thought. Jasmine was sixteen and she’d ‘met’ the band last year, that euphemism they used so often. Bearing in mind the fact that he was twenty-nine, he surely had to be committing an offence. Again. That would look great if it got out, Nicci would be so proud if he was charged with … what did they call it here? Statutory rape? At the very least he’d be deported and never allowed back into the country.

Using a gold card no doubt supplied by Daddy, Jasmine expertly chopped out a couple of fat, two inch lines of coke on a mirror she produced from her bag. She rolled up a crisp, new note and offered it to Johnny. He hesitated for a moment then thought
what the fuck
. Whatever accusations might reasonably be levelled at him, depriving girls like Jasmine of their innocence wasn’t among them.

After the show that night, Johnny saw Jasmine huddled up with Andy. Next time he looked, they’d disappeared. Colin wandered over with a drink in one hand and a smoke in the other. ‘Did you see that little blonde piece who just copped off with Andy?’ he asked. Johnny nodded. ‘I remember her from last year; she’s a right dirty little cow. She could suck the colour out of a marble, that one.’ Johnny wondered if she’d had Paul yet; it certainly looked like she was going for the full set.

Just over a fortnight later, despite Johnny’s efforts to keep a lid on things, the shit hit the fan in the UK press.

Chapter 45

‘So I’ve slept with a lot of women, Alex,’ he said quietly. ‘So maybe there were times when I didn’t know their names, either because I never thought to ask or they told me and I forgot. I’ve woken up with strangers, more than one on occasion, and had no idea if we’d fucked or not. So what? Sometimes I paid for hookers, it seemed more honest than fucking groupies. At least we all knew what we were getting into.’ He pushed his hair out of his eyes and met her gaze. ‘I’m not proud of any of this. But let’s get one thing clear. Nobody in Heartbreaker ever forced anyone to do anything they didn’t want to. Not one of us, not one of them. Ever.’

‘Colin mentioned something about having dodged a bullet with regard to the story that appeared in the press. What was that all about?’

Johnny stood up. ‘I need some space.’

Alex let him go. She watched him walk away, head down, hands stuffed into the pockets of his jeans, and hoped he could cope with stirring up so much of the past. She had assumed it was a case of rich, bored white men with dirty minds and too much time on their hands, had been prepared for him to be full of bravado about those days, Jack the lad, king of cock rock. She hadn’t been prepared for the possibility that he might be hurt and bitter, but when she thought about it, she had to admit that she wasn’t all that surprised. It can’t have done him much good to have been screwed by people just so they could say they’d had him, add his name to their ‘guitarist’ collection, or tick him off their Heartbreaker scorecard. What a fucking mess.

***

That night she held him, stroked his hair. ‘After all that stuff in the papers, we didn’t go on the road again for almost two years. We didn’t even go into the studio as a band for eighteen months. Luckily we’d recorded four or five of the concerts on the tour, so I produced a live album to fill the gap.’

‘What about the missing tapes, Johnny? What exactly were they?’

‘We’d recorded all sorts of stuff over the years. Colin got a cine camera back in the day and he took it everywhere. There was stuff from the tour bus, backstage at gigs, fooling around in hotels and bars … then when video cameras came out, we each had one. We had a load of stuff on reel-to-reel and cassette, too, including that first snippet of
Rescued
that led to us writing the song in a couple of hours. There were early versions of some of our songs, sessions that showed us writing and developing stuff, pretty much the entire history of the band was right there to see and to hear.’

‘And you’ve no idea where it went?’

‘I was sure Tom had everything. God knows where it ended up.’

‘But you had the live concert footage separate to that?’

‘Yeah. The stuff we lost was the unofficial stuff. It was less polished, but more personal.’

‘It’s lucky you had the other recordings for the live album.’

She felt Johnny nod. ‘It kept us ticking over. Tiffany had given Andy an ultimatum: get clean or get out. That shook him up pretty bad. He loved Tiff and the kids. They went to Spain for a month, she found them a little place in the back of beyond while he got off smack. It’s a fucking killer, that stuff. It eats you alive, if you let it. I don’t know who first gave it to him. He’d always used coke, you know? We all did a bit now and then, we liked the rush. But heroin, Jesus. You think you’re handling it, then you realise that you’re so far into your habit that nothing else matters.’ Alex sensed that Johnny was talking about his own experience with smack now; Andy had functioned, even though he got so thin he looked as if a gust of wind might blow him away.

‘Anyway, Andy did it. He had a few relapses, but he did it. Tiff and the kids were all the motivation he needed.’ She felt Johnny smile against her skin. ‘The twins were the double of him. A couple of long-legged, blonde kids with big green eyes. We lost touch after … well, you know. I didn’t keep in touch with many people for a while. I often wonder how they’re doing, but I feel awkward about contacting them. I wouldn’t know what to say.’ He was quiet for a while, then he continued.