The Alternative Hero (43 page)

“No …”

“Baby, listen to me, you have—”

“No! Katie, I
swear.”

“Sweetness, all you need to do is go and have a lie down, chill out. I’ll find you a private space. I think all this is getting too much for you …”

“Lance!” squeaks a female voice.

You both whirl around. It’s Petra.

“Lance,” she chirps, “Craig says to tell you all the gear’s okay, and Stan’s in there guarding it.”

“Ah! Thank
God,”
you gasp, at this most rare piece of good news. You’re so relieved, in fact, you can’t help giving Petra a little hug.

“Oh, you
arsehole!”
screams Katie, driving her fists between the two of you. “You complete
shit!
I was going out of my way to be nice to you, and you can’t even respect me enough to keep your fucking hands off her in front of me!”

“But, Katie …”

“No, you just fuck off,” she cries, holding up an angry warning finger. “You can
drown
in your little fucking paranoid and miserable world, and take her with you. I damn well hope you’re happy.”

And with that, she is off.

Petra’s bottom lip trembles.

“Sorry, Lance,” she blurts, and dashes off.

Exhausted, you turn around to the beer garden, where once again an amused audience watches. Setting your controls for the heart of the dressing room, and specifically the alcohol rider, you decide the only possible solution to your woes is to immediately get as drunk as possible.

You’ve been drunk for gigs before. Actually, you’ve been
paralytic
before; you’ve passed out, people have had to slap you and splash cold water over your face in order to bring a shred of consciousness back to your sozzled body. And you’ve always managed to perform, and perform well: singing almost note perfect, your guitar playing rhythmic and strong. Only experts would notice the difference. Strange, really, but everyone has their good points. You’re sure that if John McEnroe downed five pints of lager and a bottle of wine, he’d still
be fairly
good at tennis.

The ingredient that dramatically alters, however, is how you treat the audience. Stone-cold sober, which only happens very occasionally: you’re a bit moody and monosyllabic, only really warming up by the end. A little tipsy: you start getting cheeky and the banter flows. But moderately drunk, you believe, is when you’re at your best. Nicely antagonistic, a couple of insults fly, sometimes something controversial like throwing out a lairy audience member, arguing with a bouncer, maybe shouting at a roadie. Keeps everyone on their toes. When you smile at the end of the show and advise everyone to get home safely, that’s the payoff; it’s
so
much more effective than if you’d been pleasant all evening. Drunker than that: you start quarrelling with the band and ignoring the crowd, although you still hurl abuse at the little fuckers when they shout out song requests. Again, it keeps people in a nice state of alertness, but perhaps it shouldn’t happen more than once per tour. Recently, you have to admit, it’s been happening a lot. Thirty-two shows since
The Social Trap
was wheeled out in May: for perhaps half of those you’ve been smashed. It’s been a tough year.

The upshot of this drinking record is that no one is particularly concerned at the state you’re getting yourself into tonight at Aylesbury Craig makes a few comments, mostly because he saw the frenzy you were in earlier, but Martin’s been totally ignoring you since the press conference and Dan, judging by the near-empty bottle of rum next to him, isn’t an awful long way behind you. Bob comes in to do his usual schoolteacherly routine at around eight thirty (“Now, gents, remember what we’re all here for—keep a little bit back for the celebration afterwards”) and Petra looks perpetually worried, but that’s probably because she’s expecting an ice pick in her back from Katie at any moment.

Nine o’clock approaches, and Heidi cheerfully arrives to escort you to the backstage bar for the Radio One interview. It’s at this
point that your powers of speech vanish, and all you can do is shake your head.

“Come on, Lance. Perhaps a little of that old sparkle, to make up for earlier?”

“Sparkle,” laughs Martin. “You’ll get more sparkle out of a dead badger right now.”

“Well,
someone’s
got to do it,” Heidi insists. “Dan? Martin?”

“I ain’t going anywhere,” growls Dan.

Martin sighs and goes into his standard martyr routine.

“Oh, all right, I guess I’ll have to do it.”

“Hero,” comments Heidi, giving him a peck on the cheek.

“As long as Craig comes.”

“Whassat?” mumbles Craig, who’s been deeply occupied with his Pratchett novel.

“Come on, Spalding,” says Heidi, cheekily kicking at one of his trainers. “Remember, you’re in a rock band? Yeah? About to play to, ooh … fifty thousand people?”

“It’s a bloody good book,” he sighs, sticking his bookmark in and mooching off with Martin.

“Uh, I’ll go too,” adds Petra, following Heidi out, understandably not wishing to breathe in the poisonous atmosphere remaining between the two drunk boys.

For a good while neither you nor Dan say a thing; you’re too busy nursing your glass of Jack, and Dan his rum, while absentmindedly plucking at his acoustic bass. But suddenly Dan looks up, frowns, and speaks with a comically slow slur.

“Oh … shit. I forgot … to tell you. Per … seph … on … ee … she called. Earlier. On the phone.”

“Uh?”

“You know. Per … seph-on-ee. Gloria’s … sister.”

“Who … whose ph-phone?”

“Yours.”

You actually do own a mobile phone, a lumbering, bricklike device which doesn’t fit into any of your pockets, so you tend not to carry it around. You haven’t even looked at it since yesterday evening. You drag yourself up off the sofa and stagger to where you dumped your bag. The conversation proceeds with all the energy of two dying criminals at the end of a Tarantino film.

“D-did she … s-say … anyth-thing?”

“Yeah … to call … back.”

“Nothing … else?”

“Er … no.”

The sheer incongruity of the phone call is what shakes you from your stupor. The last time Persephone Amhurst communicated with you was through a solicitor, when you were curtly instructed not to even attempt making contact with Gloria again, or legal proceedings, restraining orders and all manner of other seriousness would ensue. To now be called directly, on your mobile phone, on the day of your biggest British gig in years, seems alarmingly peculiar to say the very least. You open your bag and extract the stout black gadget. You’re sure there’s a function somewhere for seeing who called last, but it’s hard to locate even at the soberest of times.

“Thanks … Dan …” you splutter, heading out the door.

“Yeah,” he murmurs.

John the security chap still patiently waits where he’s been all evening, now puffing on a cigarette in the rapidly fading light.

“Off out, Lance?”

“Yeah … need to m-make a … phone call.”

“Oooh, dear, you’d better take it easy on the old booze, hadn’t you? Big show coming up and all …”

“Don’t w-worry about m-me,” you drawl. “I was probably more p-pissed than this the last t-time you saw us.”

“Hmm,” John thinks, as you begin to dial Persephone’s number. “That would’ve been Langley Park, ninety-three. I was working on the sound desk, as I recall—”

“Sorry, s’cuse me.”

You duck behind one of the tents while the phone rings. That’s the trouble with being friendly to the staff: then they think they’re your mate, and …

“Hello?”

“Persephone.”

“Ah. It’s you.”

She’s always referred to you as “you,” even for the brief five minutes back in 1985 when you were both making a strained effort to like each other.

“Yes. How … are you?”

“Look,” she snaps. “I’m not going to pretend this is anything other than a message service … Frankly, I’ve no interest in how
you
are, so I can’t believe you’ve any concern for my well-being. Had a telegram from Rosamund. She’s had a car accident in Russia. She’s recovering but she’s lost the baby. She requested that the family tell you, so that’s what I’m doing.”

She hangs up without waiting for a response.

Which is just as well, really, for it’s another ten minutes before you regain the ability to form a sentence, and this time it has nothing to do with the alcohol.

In the weeks and months that follow, you’ll come to realise that all is not quite as it seems. With her usual blend of stupidity and arrogance, Persephone has managed to both under- and overestimate your relationship with Gloria, and the true details of her crash will
eventually emerge. But for now, the multilayered news hits you so hard, it’s like you’ve been kicked. Four times. In the balls, the stomach, the heart and the head. By someone with very strong legs. Just, presumably, as the Amhurst family intended. They could equally have sent someone round to beat you up; but then, they’d hardly consider that a
respectable
form of terror. You cling onto a guy rope in the darkness and reacquaint the contents of your stomach with the outside world: a deliberately violent action with all the follow-through you can muster. You feel such utter, desperate, rock-bottom loathing for yourself and your stupid, worthless little life that you strongly consider lying down and rolling around in the vomit, soaking your hair, soiling your pants and then impaling yourself with an industrial tent pole. There are only two factors which stop you from doing this. One is that there’s now comparatively less alcohol inside you and, ironically, you’ve started to sober up a bit. The other thing is more complicated, but goes something like this: you created another human life, which brings with it certain responsibilities, none of which you’ve been able to fulfil. Now you believe that life is over, and you suppose the spirit of that life can probably witness your every action, so—put simply—what would it think if it could see you rolling around in your own vomit? Would it be proud of its father? Then you’d have failed it in death as well as life. Years later, you’ll come to recognise this moment as the genesis of the paternal instinct that grew so profoundly over the next decade, but right now all it means is you keep your hair and clothes clean. You’ve also got a show to perform. Although absurd and perverse at this juncture, you suddenly feel a rush of enthusiasm. Yes. This is what I can do. I’ve fucked up everything else, but I can at least play guitar and sing rather well. Remember that?

You’ll also look back in days to come and speculate that everything
would’ve been okay from then on—had Dan not decided to lock the dressing room door.

“Dan, are you in there?”

More knocking.

“Dan! Have you locked this?”

“He closed it five minutes ago,” John the guard tells you. “Didn’t hear him lock it, but there you go, he must have.”

“Have you got another key?”

“No, I’m afraid they don’t give us the keys. The organisers will have a spare, but I’m not sure where you’ll find them right now.”

“Can’t you radio them?” you shout, whacking the door with your fist.

“No, we’re on different circuits. You see—”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake. Dan! Dan, can you hear me?”

You hear a faint groaning.

“Aw, fuck it, he’s bloody passed out.”

You stomp along the length of the hut, seeing if you can climb through the window, but the gap is too small. You shout through it instead.

“Dan, open the fucking door, you dick! We’re bloody playing in twenty minutes!”

Silence.

“Well, this is a right old mess, eh?” chuckles John, lighting a fag.

“We could barge the door down,” you think aloud.

“As I’ve got you here for a moment, Lance, I thought you might be interested to know … I
was
offered some cash a little while back.”

“You were?”

“Yeah. Fella came up about two hours ago, bloke in one of them striped shirts, offered me twenty quid to let him into your room.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, but I told him to stick it, y’see.”

“John,” you assert, grasping him by both his shoulders. “You’ve got to tell me who this guy is! I need to
know.”

“I told him to stick it,” John continues, unflinching, “because I’m an honest man, you see, Lance.”

“Good! Great! But—”

“I’m honest, I work hard, and I don’t complain. But what I
do
ask …”

“Yes?”

“… is that I get treated with a little respect when I’m only doing my job properly.”

You frown at him.

“What are you saying, John?”

“Nice young lady of yours, earlier … I bet
she
wouldn’t strike a man who was only doing his job properly.”

“What … ?”

“I was off work for two weeks after that … from stress … two weeks, with no pay, and I’ve got mouths to feed, Lance.”

“John, I have
no
idea what you’re fucking talking about,” you shout, turning around and hammering on the door again. “Dan!”

“Your blonde-haired tart at the Langley Park gig,” John goes on, his voice rising, “she laid into me when I stopped her entering the sound desk … She
insulted
me, called me names I won’t even mention, then did
this.”

He brandishes a Polaroid of himself with a beaten-up face. It looks pretty bad, but …

“Fuck off, she could
never
do that to you!”

“Kicked me when I was down, she did.”

“Just shut your mouth, John … you’re talking shit!”

“It’s amazing what someone can do when they’re that jealous … jealous of the good-looker on the video screen you were diddling. I bet that
really
stung her, knowing she looked like such a freak …”

In that one nanosecond, you decide you can either punch him or break down the dressing room door. Wisely you choose the latter. Dan wakes up from his drunken snooze on the sofa and coughs.

“Whassappenin’?”

“Wake up, you idiot, and don’t lock that fucking door again.”

You grab your acoustic guitar and two bottles of red wine, and storm straight out again.

“You’ve just lost your fucking job, John,” you spit, as you pass. “Well done. I’m getting out of this fucking place.”